[haiku-development] Re: INPUT / VOTE : --include-gpl-addons
- From: Niels Reedijk <niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:04:53 +0200
Hi Bruno,
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kind regards,
Niels
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