I am not up into the details of the GPL and various flavours of licences, but from a long Unix background I understand the intent of them...
Small history: Unix was originally written by ATT and given openly to the computing world to improve, resulting in many main flavours Berkely, SCO, Microsoft Xenix (yes them too), IBM AIX, Novell etc. There came to be disputes over who owned the original ATT intellectual property, so once some of them tried to "own" the direction of the development of Unix the various GPLs came along to provide a solid way to do two things: 1 - Provide a mechanism that crucial software (eg OS) can be put in the public domain and used so that Corporates could not take it and make it proprietary again - they had to agree to not claim ownership and put their modifications back in the public domain. Linux is the main child of this, Apache etc also. 2 - Provide a mechanism that software vendors could take open source components, and make money by adding their own software on top and selling the combination. Ie it does not prevent a company from making saleable products using open source software, but there are defined procedures to follow, for instance transparency in what was used and modified. Example OpenGL. Point 2 is the one relevant to software developers as here. It distinguishes between free of charge and freely available for use for instance....and there are several flavours of licencing. As I understand it provides a legal mechanism to hit corporates with if they misbehave, as in general they do have to follow clear licencing procedures for commercial software, and now also for open source (even if they don't pay for the open source). My 2c worth. John _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list [email protected] http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi
