On 3/20/07, Tim Haynes <tim.hay...@openlinksw.co.uk> wrote:
After conferring with Kingsley and others, I'd like to set the record
straight on licensing.
First, the GPL says nothing about commercial use or otherwise. It is
Which doesn't mean that OpenLink can't add clauses of its own. It's your
software after all.
permitted as long as you abide by the GPL terms, notably:
* if your application directly uses Virtuoso's sources or libraries
(eg
libvirtuoso), then the GPL forces your application to be released under
the
GPL too;
Yes, agreed. That does mean that application builders must take extra care
when including other non-GPL libraries. I've been in discussions where
applications that use JDBC, .Net providers and ODBC fall; the "contact
surface" of the application is not directly with the libraries that the GPL
app delivers to facilitate these conduits, but they do live in the same
address space as the calling app. I am not sure whether that constitutes
derivative use; most of the discussions I was in petered out before a
conclusion was reached; my reading of the GPL says (but I am not a lawyer by
any stretch of the imagination) that the letter would allow non-GPL use,
while the intent is perfectly clear that it would be regarded as derivative
use. Maybe the GPLv3 addresses this, I'm not up to speed with it.
Emile
