On Friday, 16 October 2015 at 21:01:02 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
The distribution is implied in the comment. If there isn't distribution, the license taint isn't important, why bring it up?

That was not implied. You can have a license which is much more limiting, the GPL is fairly liberal. Most software that is written is not for redistribution!

In any case, having a GPL license for a library diminishes its usefulness to proprietary software houses.

If that's what you you mean, then be explicit about it.

It depends on what you do. Sure, if you are a pure SAAS house, GPL is perfectly fine, but if one day you want to license that as an installable server, you need to re-develop that GPL piece,

It isn't obvious, you should be able to lease a server without that being considered obtaining a copy? To figure that out you'll need a legal interpretation of the GPL for your jurisdiction.

and make sure your developers never looked at the code. It's not something to take lightly.

No, having read code in the past does not affect copyright. If you don't translate the GPL code while writing then it isn't a derived work.

What you are thinking about is clean room implementation of reverse engineered APIs to hardware where the code only is tiny stubs of machine code that has to be written in a certain way to be compatible.



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