Jack Coats wrote: > When you use a M$ product, you don't own the software. You own the rights > to use it under the license agreement. > Same is true for EMC under the agreements. And if you want to sell it, as > described before, you have responsibilities > to make the source code available. ... Now it can be argued that you don't > 'owe the customer' your enhancements, > unless you published them under GPL (of some flavor) also. In that case > your enhancements would be proprietary, > but you would still have to make the GPLed portion of the code base > available to the customers. > Well, that's true but possibly misleading.
The key part there is "the GPLed portion of the code base". That's where a lot of people (including myself) get hung up. The GPL has in it a definition of what constitutes a "derivative work". There are also legal precedents that might have bearing in a court case. In a nutshell, if you use any GPL headers for your code, you link your code with GPL code to form a single binary (whether done at compile time or at run time), or you make a system that can't function without your code (ie, even if you figure out a way to avoid the whole "linking" thing, but the system still can't do anything without your code), then your code must also be licensed under the GPL. In the case of EMC, that means that if I wish to make a user interface based on e.g. Touchy, I must license the resulting program under the GPL, since Touchy is under the GPL and I have created a derivative of it. If I wish to write my own user interface from scratch (without looking at all the existing ones ...), then I probably have to release it under the GPL, since I would likely have to include the src/emc/nml_intf/emc.hh header file (among others), which is licensed under the GPL (not the LGPL). That may not itself be enough to require GPL licensing for the resulting work, but since my program has to be linked with the NML library, which is under the GPL, my program has to be GPL anyway. See, it gets confusing :) It's best to read both the GPL itself <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html> and the GPL FAQ <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html> thoroughly, probably multiple times. That's the only way to reduce the confusion. - Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Oracle to DB2 Conversion Guide: Learn learn about native support for PL/SQL, new data types, scalar functions, improved concurrency, built-in packages, OCI, SQL*Plus, data movement tools, best practices and more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
