Hello Adam,
I've never really understood why people complain about the GPL being viral - perhaps you can enlighten me with another viewpoint. I only ever see it from the point of view where someone is very happy to make use of code another has provided for free, but they don't want to share their own code in return, which seems a bit selfish and unfair to me.
I am sure the numerous developers working on Apache, FreeBSD, etc. would disagree with that characterization. Perhaps --- at least this is how I view it --- the problem is not that the GPL requires people to "share in return", but it requires people to "share in return" in extremely specific, prescribed ways, which also happen to be incompatible with other extremely specific, prescribed ways to "share in return". And we end up with a situation where even the FSF's own libgcc, autoconf, and bison projects --- there may be others --- decided they need to open up "special exceptions" to the GPLv3 terms. E.g. "As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you distribute this file [./missing] as part of a program that contains a configuration script generated by Autoconf, you may include it under the same distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program." and "As a special exception, when this file is copied by Bison into a Bison output file, you may use that output file without restriction. This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation in version 1.24 of Bison." Something is not well, if we must have so many "exceptions" for Free Software to work as it should. (My libi86 project happens to use autoconf, so yes, this issue is indeed quite relevant for my code.) Thank you! -- https://gitlab.com/tkchia :: https://github.com/tkchia _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
