On Tue, 4 May 2004, Bill Holt wrote:
> Thanks Jerry, > > I don't understand why anyone would object to these people selling a > compiled, easy-install version of an OS program. [a kind of round about answer to why people would object, with hopefully lots of explaining for anyone else listening] The GPL exists to stop companies making money from open-source without it helping the open-source world out. Basically if you 'distribute' a change to a GPL program, you have to GPL your code. LGPL exists to allow people to 'distribute' code that does not change or add to an LGPL program but merely reuses it in its intended form. LGPL is a bit frowned on my the GPL creators nowadays and really exists as a marketing scheme to make it easier for GPL code to conquer areas dominated by proprietary programs. LGPL's wording is a bit too close to the C computer language and so can get quite technical to decide if you're obeying it. The other side of the dice in the open source world is the BSD type of licence. This is more open and basically just says that if you do something with our code, make sure you mention we did it and don't try to sell it off as our code or somehow supported by us. OS X sits on top of a FreeBSD-clone and uses this licence. Microsofts TCP program was also a clone of a BSD-licenced program at one point. The Apache web server is probably the most well known of the BSD licenced things. So the general gist in open source is that it's fine to resell the code I wrote as long as you mention that I was involved and don't make any promises on my behalf. The GPL addition is that if you change my code and let people use it, I have full rights to it and can add it to my code. The legal question in this case is whether wrapping a command line tool in a GUI is a change to my code. If the download contained my code, then the answer is usually yes and the GPL applies. Hen | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be May 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
