Is this really OpenSource? [LWN.net]

Is this really OpenSource?

Posted Oct 27, 2003 4:10 UTC (Mon) by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
In reply to: Is this really OpenSource? by TeeJay
Parent article: Alias-i Goes Open Source with LingPipe Natural Language Processing Tools

>>its pretty reasonable that the data generated by it remains open source as well as just the code.

It's rare for open source products to affect the data generated. The only example I know of is ancient Bison. Bison is a program that generates C code. At one point, the generated code included bits of GPL code and thus could only be used under the terms of the GPL. Bison was changed in version 1.24 and the generated code is no longer automatically GPL licensed.

I can see why LingPipe added paragraph 4 to their license. The GPL is not clear about what meaning of "linking" is. For example, is piping linking? The LingPipe license makes it clear that it is.

GCC faced a similar problem when Micheal Dupont wrote his GCC Introspector. The introspector allowed people to save internal GCC information to a file. While the feature would be usefull for debugging, but it would also let someone write a non-Free machine code generator using GCC as a base. In the end, GCC decided that the benefits were not worth the cost.

Unfortunately for LingPipe, I'm not sure that their license is legally binding. Theoretically, I could write a program that "uses any output of [LingPipe]" without ever using LingPipe or agreeing to the license. At that point, I would be violating their license but they couldn't do anything about it. Compare that to the GPL where you can't violate the GPL without also violating copyright laws.

My feeling is that the should have just released the code under the GPL. The GPL is a little ambigous about linking but it would cover most of the situations they care about. The situations that the GPL doesn't cover are not worth the pain of using an unconventional license.

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