Ralf Bokelberg wrote:
As far as i understand it, a user can DO whatever he likes with the
software. Only if you wish to make the software part of your own product
and publish the results to the public, you are forced to either join the
gpl or to ask the original author to get a commercial license.
Thinking of Deng for example, i'm free to use Deng in my website and
even in my customers websites, but when i want to sell Deng as part of a
website creation tool, i need to get a license or join the gpl.
Is this correct?
That's not quite how I understand the license. If you publish an swf containing
or using Deng as a component, you're publishing a derived work of Deng to the
public and are therefore bound to oblige to the relevant parts of it's license.
Namely, Deng being GPL'd, you have to make the source of your application -
that's the swf - available under the GPL as well.
Really, the only way to use Deng and not release your source would be to ask
Claus if he - and all other people who contributed to Deng - would be willing
to make Deng available under a second license as well. This is how quite a few
companies make money from their GPL'd software, Sun with
OpenOffice.org/StarOffice and TrollTech with Qt being famous examples.
I other words, using a gpl tool doesn't mean, that the results of the
usage are gpl too.
The _use_ of GPL'd software to create some self contained software/markup/data
is another story alltogether. If Deng was some server side software implemented
in, say, Java or PHP, that took xhtml markup and churned out self contained swf
files, you'd be free to publish those under any license you'd want to - much as
you can compile closed source software with the GPL'd GCC compiler.
And by the way: You can't join the GPL, as it's just a license (and you don't
really want to join a license, right? I mean, the life of a typical license
can't really be described as interesting. Granted, if you're a famous license,
you come around quite a bit, but then again, you still don't see that much of
the world, being just words on paper or in file and such ;-))
cheers,
till
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