Steve Holden wrote: > Paul Rubin wrote: >> I'm trying to avoid flame wars too, but my take on this is that Kent's >> reading is a little too restrictive and the GPL isn't really a problem >> in this situation unless he's actually modifying Karrigell itself, >> rather than writing applications that run under it. I'm not trying to >> advocate Karrigell (I browsed the docs for a minute and it looks nice >> but I have no experience with it) but I don't see the GPL as an >> obstacle to that type of usage. All kinds of proprietary applications >> are written and distributed all the time to run under the GPL'd Linux >> kernel and Karrigell apps don't seem too terribly different from that.
You may be right, I honestly don't know. Would your interpretation change if I wanted to distribute an app built with py2exe that bundles Karrigell and my code? > Indeed. But most software authors aren't lawyers and aren't likely to > trust their own judgment about these matters unless the situation is > pretty unambiguous. That really is the issue as much as anything. Paul has raised some good questions for which I don't have good answers. Maybe using Karrigell is analogous to writing an app to run on Linux. OTOH maybe it is more like linking to a library. I could ask the author for clarification - which I would then have to document in a form acceptable to my own company's lawyers. Or I could choose to use a product that doesn't leave any doubt that I can distribute it as I like in a proprietary product. > I suspect this may be evidence that Microsoft's > "viral" propaganda has had some effect. Not in my case, at least. I have been avoiding GPL products at work for many years, much longer than Microsoft has been telling me to do so. > > In this case I agree there's likely to be a clear separation between > server and content that will allow Kent to distribute an unmodified > Karrigell and a separate proprietary content bundle without > interference, but it's too late (at least for that project) now. Maybe next time... Kent -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list