[haiku-development] Re: INPUT / VOTE : --include-gpl-addons

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Bruno Albuquerque<bga@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:23:04 -0700, Urias McCullough said:
>
>> I'd love to hear the interpretation from someone who is very much in
>> the know, but who is not also a GPL zealot...
>
> And this is the reason for my meeting on Monday. Daniel Berlin is
> actually a lawyer specialized in open source. Chris DiBona is
> responsible for making sure we conform to open-source licenses at
> Google.

Awesome :)

Things I'd love to see clarified: I have understood that the "Work" or
"Program" is the end product, the distributed binaries themselves,
which are subject to the license terms if it is derived from any GPL
licensed work. Thus, it's the act of compiling the GPL code into your
binary is what turns the end product into the derivative. This is why
I assert that the license on the code files that are not GPL, do not
have to be converted to GPL, they just have to be released per the
terms of the GPL per the resulting GPL licensed binary is subjected
to.

Thus, if this is true, any source code released per the terms of the
GPL on a binary distribution can be picked apart again, GPL portions
removed, and compiled again into a new "work" that is *not* derived
from any GPL work. Thus, MIT/BSD licensed code distributed per the
terms of the GPL due to inclusion in a larger work which includes GPL
code (but not licensed as GPL code themselves), do not magically
become GPL.

I'm hoping that this clarification can hopefully remove some of the
"fear" that Haiku's codebase will somehow turn to GPL overnight ;)

The linking stuff, plugins, loadable modules, that part baffles me
still (as it does most people, I think this is the largest debate
revolving around GPL).

- Urias

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