[haiku-development] Re: INPUT / VOTE : --include-gpl-addons
- From: Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:41:34 +0200
On 2009-08-20 at 19:58:44 [+0200], Urias McCullough <umccullough@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Niels Reedijk<niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > 2009/8/20 Bruno Albuquerque <bga@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> >> 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.
> >
> > Good idea.
> >
> > However, and you may curse me, but part of the GPL is not the actual
> > letter of the license, but the spirit. Peope that consciously release
> > their work under the GPL, do this in part because they believe in the
> > free eco-system where people distribute their work, improve it and
> > share these changes. The license was written to support exactly that.
> >
> > Licensing under the GPL gives you protection that your work is not
> > used in closed-source work.
>
> And of course, we are not using GPL code in a closed-source work. So I
> don't see how we're violating the terms, nor the spirit.
>
> > This also means that it cannot be used in work that is licensed less
> > restrictively, like ours. Sometimes that's a conscious decision, since
> > they believe in the forced-free eco-system that the GPL creates
> > (paradox not intended), but sometimes they just chose the GPL because
> > it was the popular choice.
>
> But you keep going back to the source code, not the work itself. The
> "work" is the released product, not the source that was written for
> it.
>
> When using GPL sources to produce your work, your work must be
> released under terms of the GPL. That doesn't prevent someone from
> taking the GPL sources out and producing a version of the work that
> isn't under GPL.
Yes:
"These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
sections when you distribute them as separate works."
> AFAICT, there's no stipulation in the license that ALL of the source
> code used to create the work must be released as GPL, only that the
> work itself must be (which then requires you to release all source
> code used to create said work).
"But when you
distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based
on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of
this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the
entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it."
IOW, "each and every part" has to be GPLed. I.e. if a part wasn't GPLed
before, its original license must allow sublicensing under the GPL.
> This is where people (usually
> developers I notice) tend to get all wrapped up. We are not violating
> the spirit of GPL at all, as long as we release the source code, per
> the terms of the license, we have done exactly what was necessary -
> given the end user the full freedom to modify/edit and redistribute
> the work.
>
> Where would we have failed?
Nowhere at all. :-)
> > Now intuitively I feel (and I hope others see why) that using a GPL
> > library as an add-on to is actually extending that application, and
> > that you are using GPL code to perform a function of your application.
>
> And if this is true, all that means is my above statements go into
> effect, and we must release our source code per the terms.
Yep.
> > That's why I feel that no matter what the outcome is with the meeting
> > with your lawyer, that it is in the spirit of the GPL to just ask the
> > authors/copyrightholders (the latter could be a whole lot though) to
> > grant us an exception. Some of them probably didn't even know the GPL
> > would be so strict, others might consciously choose to give us an
> > exception.
> >
> > Depending on the outcome with the meeting with the lawyers this can be
> > a formal (written) exception, or just an informal one.
> >
> > Having said that, my brain opens up a whole new can of worms when it
> > comes to derived works of the Haiku codebase, but I'll keep it in my
> > brain for the time being.
>
> I still totally fail to see why this is a problem. Using GPL code in a
> program doesn't make the rest of that program's source code GPL.
As long as the rest of the program is covered by a license that is
GPL-compatible, there is no problem. The whole work (and all of it's parts)
is just (sub)licensed under the GPL. Distributing the "whole work" without
the GPL parts can still be done under the original license.
Back to the media codecs: They are loaded by libmedia and thus indirectly
by the program (at least there's no separate process). So when we
distribute a Haiku with such an add-on libmedia has to be GPLed. An
application using this libmedia would also have to be GPLed (unless it can
be considered a "major OS component"). Since we could distribute a Haiku
without the GPL add-ons, libmedia would be purely MIT, which in turn would
pose no restrictions on application writers. So writing the application
against the MIT libmedia would still allow it to be closed source and used
with a GPL libmedia. This kind of sounds like working around the spirit of
the GPL, respectively why people distribute their code under the GPL.
CU, Ingo
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