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Selling GPL appliances
Selling GPL appliances
Posted Oct 11, 2005 15:27 UTC (Tue) by dd9jn (subscriber, #4459)Parent article: Single-company free software
A number of companies are _using_ the source code against us, by selling or renting appliances, thus exploiting a loophole in the GPL. [...]
Sure there are no concerns with the GPL in this case: Every buyer of such an appliance is entitled to the full source code of the GPLed software.
The real problem are vendors putting a web based user interface on top of GPLed software and keeping that user interface code proprietary. Obviously they think that the whole work (GPL engine + frontend) does not count as a derivative work so that they can get away with such a business model. It gives them a competitive advantage over other vendors who GPL everything and thus are required to share all improvements between themselfs.
However the GPL does not say that executing a GPL program by another process is enough to make the whole a non-derivate work. I guess it is only a matter of time that such GPL violations will come to the attention of a broader public.
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*Renting* GPL appliances
Posted Oct 12, 2005 20:30 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]
In a sense it may be legal and possible to *rent out* an appliance with embedded GPL code. In that case it can be argued that the rental is a service rather than a "distribution" of the work.
Certainly I can offer you a service in which I employ my own proprietary extensions to a GPL'd product to perform some work for you; giving you back the results and refusing to reveal my sources. I haven't distributed the original work nor any derivative of that work; merely a product of that work's output.
In fact that is precisely what Dawson Engler at Coverity is doing using his xgcc patches to GCC to perform automated static source code auditing (as he did for the Linux kernel in a couple of reasonably well-publiced instances, through the Stanford MetaL code checker project)
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I suspect this is the primary concern that the Nessus people had. That competitors were offering competing services based on Nessus and some plug-ins or NASL modules that they'd written themselves.
The emergence of sophisticated AJAX toolkits and techniques, along with the increasing ubiquity of permanently connected broadband across broader populations will exacerbate this problem. I can potentially take any sophisticated bit of UI independent code, provide an AJAX/web front end and offer it as a service rather than distributing it. I seem to recall that this was one of the major issues that the FSF was hoping to mitigate with version 3 of the GPL.
JimD