Clarity and terminology

Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:04 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: Clarity and terminology by arcticwolf
Parent article: The Open Software License, Version 3.0

You said it yourself. If I want to incorporate ANY GPL code into my project, I have to make my ENTIRE project GPL-compatible. The only alternative, as you say, is to not incorporate the GPLed code.

So how can you possibliy claim that the GPL is not viral? Sounds pretty clear-cut to me!

Clarity and terminology

Posted Aug 18, 2005 19:32 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (2 responses)

> If I want to incorporate ANY GPL code into my project, I have to make my
> ENTIRE project GPL-compatible.

I'm not sure what you mean by entire. If it's for example a Linux
distribution, you need to have as GPL compatible only the part that can be
legally interpreted as derivative works. (The definition of what is
derivative works is not so clear-cut though.)

> The only alternative, as you say, is to not incorporate the GPLed code.

Or ask the copyright holders for a license for the code that allows
incorporating the code. This is a base of e.g. business around Qt and
MySQL.

These are the same options as with proprietary code/products. With GPL
you just have the additional possibility of licensing your derived work as
GPL.

Calling GPL "viral" is about equal to calling proprietary products
"encouraging copyright infringement" because you don't have means to
legally distribute derivate works freely (free in the "free beer"
sense)...

Clarity and terminology

Posted Aug 18, 2005 23:09 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

That's a good point about the term "virus." A biological virus doesn't just tempt a cell to make more virus. It enters the cell by force and forces the cell to make more virus. GPL, on the other hand, is strictly quid pro quo.

I think there was some incorrect reference to "GPL-compatible" in this thread. If I have a piece of code A that I'm licensed only under GPL to distribute, and I write some code B and combine them to form program AB, and then I distribute AB, I must license all of the code, including my B code, to the recipients under GPL. Not GPL compatible, but GPL itself.

I can separately distribute just my B code under any license I please.

The GPL-compatible license comes into play if I want to add in code C, which someone else wrote. If I distribute ABC, I must distribute all of it -- A, B, and C -- under GPL. That means that the author of C must license C to me under some kind of license that gives me the power to redistribute it under GPL. Such a license is GPL-compatible.

Clarity and terminology

Posted Aug 25, 2005 7:22 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

You don't have to SEPARATELY distribute your code B under a different licence at all.

You can distribute your combined work and just say "A is GPL, therefore B must be GPL too. But B is also X-licence, if the recipient wishes to extract it and use it elsewhere".

It's then the recipient's responsibility to make sure he doesn't accidentally include A when he takes B code to use in his product C.

Cheers,
Wol