Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 8:17 PM Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Request: Change the allowed license of plugins
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 4:20 AM Subject: RE: [Ethereal-dev] Request: Change the allowed license of plugins > You're right that you maybe unconcerned with the discomfort of some company's > lawyers. Based on what I've seen from some of the others on this list, I think > I'm not alone. The ability of ethereal to dissect a particular protocol is only relevant to those in possession of objects utilizing that protocol. To non-customers of such products, the ability or lack thereof in ethereal to dissect that protocol would be completely irrelevant. Your lawyers may investigate this more in depth with the people at EFF, maybe it will turn out that they will all agree that GPLing a dissector (which is only an interface description and not a protocol spec) will have no impact whatsoever on the validity of any patents. EFF have lawyers that understand GPL, this list have no lawyers afaik. I dont belive for one second that once a patent has been approved, that releasing a GPL dissector afterwards would nullify the patent. You might not want to release a source-code dissector (GPL or not) BEFORE the patent is approved but that is a completely different issue. Patent applications do not take forever to process, just delay releasing the dissector until it has been approved and you should be safe. > > Let me step back and ask the question, what is the effect of this change to the > Ethereal community. Those who wish to release decoders under GPL can continue > to do so. Companies that wish to release decoders for proprietary protocols do > so under a different license and as a plugin to Ethereal and I see this as a > benefit to the Ethereal user community in general. Companies with siginificant > investment in an idea or protocol that is proprietary will err on the side of > caution. It is a benefit only for those people in possession of such products that use the proprietary protocol in question? I.e. value-add. > > I don't see the detrimental effect of this change. Am I wrong ? Who can I sue or who will guarantee to compensate me, normal consultancy rate, for every hour I have invested in developing features for ethereal if the change would allow a loop-hole to render the license meaningless? I.e. to allow my contributions to be part of closed-source commerical products? GPL does not protect me 100% from that either but it is the best I have today. Other contributors may have similar views.
