On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Platonides <[email protected]> wrote: > I think that's because they are more liberal licenses, like MIT*. Do we > have any code that isn't GPL-compatible? > > > *To which extent they can do that is debatable. Maybe they can only > license under that license *some* pieces of their code.
There are at least some pages on mediawiki.org for extensions that are not under any open-source license at all. I remember at least one case where an extension there was only available as commercial software, and other developers in #mediawiki disagreed with my opinion that it should be deleted. > I consider that completely unrelated. PHP is a platform, similarly as > how you can use a non-GPL program on a GPL kernel. Or write a document > on a GPL text editor without it being automatically open source. Insofar as PHP is just a program that processes input files, yes. But it also includes a standard library. If the PHP standard library implementation were licensed under the GPL, then at least according to the FSF's interpretation, it would be forbidden to write non-GPL programs for it. That's why OpenJDK (at the advice of the FSF) is GPL with a special linking exemption -- without the exemption, all programs written for it might have to be GPL. Likewise the GNU C standard library is licensed under the LGPL, not GPL. Of course, in some of these cases there are non-GPL implementations too, and if you write it to be compatible with multiple implementations, I don't think anyone argues that it's a derivative work of any of them . . . I'm still not clear on this point. But in any event, I don't see why there'd be a difference between a library that happens to be shipped with a programming language implementation, and one that's not. > It wouldn't need to be under GPL. AFAIK, the case for that is that > kernel drivers usually copy code from the GPL ones. Also note that since > some version, they have apis not available for closed drivers. > > I think there are some interesting discussions about this on lkml archives. Linus Torvalds, at least, thinks that some drivers intrinsically need to be GPL: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0312.0/0670.html I don't know whether his view is correct, but it's certainly prevalent in the Linux kernel community, from what I've seen. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
