domenica 6 luglio 2008, Peter Fritzson ha scritto: > Regarding GPL the situation is anyway complex. > If you very are strict, GPL 3 is in fact incompatible with GPL 2.1. > The vast majority of published GPL software is probably GPL 2.1.
Probably, the vast majority uses the "version 2 or later" clause (including all FSF projects), Linux is a notable exception since they use v2 only. > Also, the Trolltech license has an additional clause under its dual > license, that the software under GPL should be not be used commercially. > This is probably not allowed according to GPL, if you are very strict. It would be, but I think you have misunderstood something. The GPL version is perfectly fine for commercial use - only the software based on Qt must be GPL-compliant as well. If by "commercially" you mean "closed source", well of course then - but OpenModelica is not closed-source, right? If someone wants to incorporate OpenModelica in closed-source projects, and they intend to link to Qt, they also have to acquire a Qt commercial licence. However, with the current licence scheme, even open-source applications including OpenModelica must require commercial Qt (that's a big load of money), because the GPL version cannot be used legally. > The reason for the additional clause in OSMC-GPL of requiring > the software to be combined with OpenModelica to be open-source > is to give a good reason to join the consortium and support the work, > e.g. for those who what to use OpenModelica commercially, combining with > proprietary code. > (There are lots of free commercial usage of the Gnu C compiler, for > example, by calling the GNU compiler as a separate process). Well, one should look at the advantages and disadvantages of this approach: 1) How much additional support have you gathered by companies thanks to that clause until now? 2) How much support are you going never to see from people who do not wish to contribute to a project whose coed cannot be reused in free software because of licence incompatibilities? Furthermore, the clause stating "an application program (i.e., not an operating system) that integrates and calls parts of OpenModelica (also including the case of executing parts of OpenModelica as another process), must be made freely available and easily accessible as open source" is open to a lot of interpretation. For instance, if I use a shell like bash, that's how OpenModelica is called (fine: Bash is free software). If I use the GUI, then all the GUI layers (X, Qt, whatever) should be free software (fine, they are). On Windows, the graphical engine or the DOS shell would have to be free software, and that is not going to happen. The problem is that the "operating system" exception mentioned in the licence is a term that has a lot of interpretations. > >From the OSMC-PL point of view, there is no problem of combining > > it with GPL code under OSMC-PL. > > If you are not so strict, this might be fine also from the GPL point of > view. > > If you are very strict, there are lots of problems with GPL, including > the use of GPL2 and GPL3 code together. (GPL3 allows GPL2, but GPL2 does > not allow extensions/restrictions found in GPL3). I do not think that in legal matters you can afford to be non-strict. This should be clarified, and with some urgence. I think the FSF would be helpful in this matter, if you contacted them. Cheers, -Federico
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