On 20/01/2007, at 7:13 AM, Daniel L. Taylor wrote:
Couldn't one ship a proxy application under GPL that sits between a MySQL server and a closed source client
Provided it is sufficiently decoupled (eg: socket-based comms) then yes, I'm certain this is safe and has indeed been used as a pattern elsewhere.
http://www.adti.net/ip/opensource.pdf seems to have a reasonable discussion where they refer to this technique (incorrectly) as "dynamic linking" however I identified at least one point which I think is incorrect, on a very quick skim
"There are a number of approaches that are commonly used to bypass GPL license restrictions. ... Another strategy is to reverse engineer a GPL product in a different programming language, that way, there would exist two completely different sets of source code"
I know from copyright studies that mere translation into a different language is well-established as NOT breaking copyright. Therefore I'm fairly certain that translation alone can't free code from the GPL. There is a followup commentary http://www.juliao.org/pub/adti- comments.pdf but that fails to identify this point.
It also fails to correct a poor definition of "dynamic linking" in the original, so I'd take both with a few grains of salt.
However, there are quite a few other references to this technique floating around.
As this amounts to a Service-Oriented Architecture, I hardly think the GPL bandits would be able to pursue something clearly decoupled.
Indeed, I've proposed a similar technique as the way to get around the inability of the new Intel builds of RB to call the old REALDatabase format - build a PPC console app to accompany your main GUI and forward database calls, or do a batch conversion.
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