Jorge Van Hemelryck wrote: > Is it not possible to just include my work (with some improvements > such as conditional compilation of the functionality) with the > distribution of FlightGear ? It would make my task of making people > accept FlightGear here easier...
But you seem to miss the point. It would also *remove* the GPL requirements from anyone who develops HUD code. I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff, especially when the code in question is something we can never see or use. I'm not questioning your motive. I admire that you want to evangelize FlightGear and that you have worked at home to do integration work for your project. But I don't think you have considered the licensing issues completely. Taking this kind of design to an extreme: we could write a dynamic loading API for every module in the simulator. A proprietary, non-GPL simulator (clearly "derived from" FlightGear) could then legally redistribute itself along with FlightGear solely by linking to those APIs. Now, that might be OK if we all agreed that is what we wanted. But such a situation is certainly not the "normal" interpretation of the GPL, which says that modified versions must be shared under the same license. Honestly, if there were actual simulator features involved here (an existing external library that we wanted to use), I would be more amenable to this idea. But as it stands, the only beneficiaries to this patch are doing proprietary development and cannot contribute to the project. And as written, the patch acts as an "escape clause" that allows HUD module developers to ignore the requirements that the GPL places on the rest of the code. Andy _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
