*Renting* GPL appliances

*Renting* GPL appliances

Posted Oct 12, 2005 20:30 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256)
In reply to: Selling GPL appliances by dd9jn
Parent article: Single-company free software

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

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