Last comment, really. I you may be very well right. But right now, NOBODY knows what the GPL <REALLY> does to code. Our lawyers have made it very clear that the GPL tars all code with a VERY broad brush, because it is so ambiguous.
As I mentioned to Mark in a private piece of email, one of the fundamental problems with this idea is that copyright can be construed to cover more than just actual expressions of code, but also algorithms. So consider the case of someone working on BSD licensed code. That person happens to look at code licensed under the GPL (it's open source, right?). A week later, he writes code in his BSD licensed application that happens to mirror the clever algorithm he found in the GPL code. Now he has accidentally put GPL licensed material into the BSD licensed code. And it's my understanding that the viral nature of the GPL causes ALL of that BSD licensed code to be licensed under the GPL. Unfortunately, it will be up to the courts whether or not this is really the case. And that really means that it will be up to the company with the most expensive (or largest number) of lawyers to decide. Microsoft's lawyers are quite correctly taking the most conservative approach until there is actual case law to determine what the GPL really means. So MS employees working on any form of open source project (or looking at open source code) is strictly verboten. And NOBODY wants to try to challenge the GPL to court for fear of what that might come out. If you think about it, it's the same reason why the NRA doesn't mount a challenge against gun regulations on 2nd amendment grounds - they aren't 100% certain that they'll win, and if they lose, it's a total disaster (one possible outcome would be that people might lose their 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms unless they are in the National Guard), so it's FAR safer to not litigate. BTW, it turns out that if you get a senior VP's approval, it IS ok to include SOME pieces of open source technology as long as it isn't licensed under the GPL. The GPL is strictly off limits, but non GPL open distributions (like the BSD distribution) are ok, if a senior VP buys off on the use. Larry Osterman My brother is a lawyer, my father is a lawyer, my stepmother is a lawyer, and my grandfather was a lawyer - I'm surrounded by lawyers :) -----Original Message----- From: Lyndon Nerenberg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2002 7:38 PM To: Larry Osterman Cc: Pete Naylor; Marek Kowal; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Outlook express AUTH command > For example, the TCP/IP stack in Linux is covered by the BSD license, > but since code in the TCP/IP stack shows up in a Linux distro that's > covered by the GPL, a lawyer could argue that work done on the BSD > TCP/IP stack that eventually makes its way into a Linux distribution is > ALSO covered by the GPL. So for all intents and purposes, the GPL > (which is the most restrictive of the open source licenses) could be > construed to cover all the other open source licenses. I know this is getting way off topic, but this misconception needs to be shut down. A derivitave license cannot remove rights from a parent license on the parent code. If a Gnu project programmer absorbs BSD licensed code, changes it, then redistributes the modified code under the GPL, the GPL on the derived code cannot [1] affect the license of the code it was derived from. --lyndon [1] You could make an argument against this if the original author gave up his moral rights to the original code, From what I've read, though, it's not possible to give away those rights in that manner in some (many?) jurisdictions. Specifically, Canadian law (case law and the Copyright Act) seems to make this very difficult to do. (IANAL, etc.)
