On Jan 15, 2007, at 1:00 AM, Andy Dent wrote:
The only cost involved is that if you want to modify the software,
you can't sell the results without also giving those results away.
This seems fair enough to me: you're basing what you're doing on
what a bunch of other people have done, and *they* are giving you
*their* work on that same basis. We all must share, so that we all
may benefit. Fair enough.
You also can't just USE the source without being forced to give
away your work - it's not just about modifying. It's not just about
selling software - you can't give away a binary that makes use of
GPL source without violating the GPL. If you distribute, for profit
or not, you are supposed to publish your source.
There is a fairly broad grey area between USE and MODIFY -- which the
GPL entirely ignores, treating everything as MODIFY.
This is why the LGPL was invented. I find it interesting, amusing,
and a little tragic that the MySQL client libraries were not released
under LGPL.
I don't too much care, though: if I have a client who insists I write
a MySQL app, they can bear the cost. If they are not in a tragic
backward-compatibility bind and/or have more sense than that, we can
just use Postgres, and we'll both be happy.
Regards,
Guyren G Howe
Relevant Logic LLC
guyren-at-relevantlogic.com ~ http://relevantlogic.com
REALbasic, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python programming
PostgreSQL, MySQL database design and consulting
Technical writing and training
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