From time to time, we have had speakers on various OpenSource licensing speak at the BLU. The GPL was born because developers were contributing their stuff to the public domain, and some people were grabbing those and copyrighting that code. The original GPL was also referred to as "copyleft". But, there are a lot of issues with all licensing. Take a commercial closed-source project that runs on Linux, but it incorporates some GPL'd code into its product, such as Bison and Flex. The closed-source developer needs to be careful that his code does not become polluted by the GPL, and at the same time he needs to be respectful of the third-party licensing or code that he distributed. For instance, most code on Linux is compiled using some version of GCC. It also uses libraries, like libc that is GPL code.
In any case, maybe we can set up a future BLU meeting and get a speaker who can simply explain both GPL as well as other OpenSource licenses like Apache, BSD, and a few others. -- Jerry Feldman <[email protected]> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
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