You may recall a mention in Monday's meeting of license difficulties for commercial implementations.At this point in the history, I discovered that the rsync open source project used a license that forbid charging for any code that included their code. That would have made commercial implementations problematic.
[Disclaimer: INAL, etc.] Not quite. "Included" is the loaded word here. I haven't examined the GPL v3 in depth, but I have looked very carefully at v2. The GPL v2 tries to make the distinction between derived works (ie, modified versions of the licensed program) and "mere aggregation" for the purposes of distribution. Note: the GPL does not try to dictate what you do in the privacy of your own home/office. Typically this distinction is represented by looking at whether a program links to the GPL licensed code or not. If it does link to it, the linked code must be GPL for it to be distributed. In this case, if the rsync program is executed by proprietary software as a command line tool, and qualifies as "mere aggregation" then the only addition requirement on that software would be that it package the source to rsync along with the binary.
However, I just discovered that with the announcement of rsync 3.0 onMarch 1, 2008 they have moved from GPL version 2 to GPL version 3: http://www.samba.org/rsync/GPL.htmlFrom a first glance through, I can not find similar text that would prohibit charging for code that includes their code. People who areused to reading these GPL licences should take a look to see if you see limits on commercial use of the rsync code. So the difficulty about commercial implementations could be OBE.
GPL v3 appears to make a similar distinction http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html section 5:
> A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent > works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, > and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, > in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an > “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not > used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users > beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work > in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other > parts of the aggregate. Rob -- Robert Loomans Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Software Engineer, APNIC Phone: +61 7 3858 3100 http://www.apnic.net Fax: +61 7 3858 3199
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