[DB-SIG] Popy - Psycopg - PyPgSQL - PyGreSQL

[Magnus Lycka]

At 17:53 2002-10-01 +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>Note that the GPL is only important if you want to redistribute
>whatever code you write against the GPLed piece of the application.

An important point, but...
* I've had customers who we're so sure that their custom
   version of a system would be so much better than the
   standard product that they paid us extra to get a share
   in the profits if we resold their version to other
   customers. (Never happened of course.) Would they have
   accepted GPL? No way! (Actually it was a municipality!)
* You never know where the software you build for a certain
   purpose ends up, or what it transforms to after some years.
   A lot of software which is sold today was initally developed
   for internal use... The consequences of using GPL *might*
   be more far reaching than you think...

>Only in that case you are forced to ship the source code
>to whoever wants to take a look. Placing a non-GPLed piece
>of code between the rest of your application and the GPLed
>part doesn't secure your application from the GPL: you are
>forming a new complete work and that's what the GPL applies
>to if you redistribute the work to someone else. It doesn't
>matter whether you are linking, loading byte code or simply
>using GPLed static data in your application.
>
>The only safe way to deal with this is to stick to LGPLed
>libaries.

Or MIT / BSD / Python etc...

This has always been my interpretation also.

But it's tricky. CherryPy (www.cherrypy.org) is GPL. It
copies parts of itself into the generated code it creates.
(It's a neat tool for building web sites.)

The author of CherryPy states very clearly that his intention
is NOT that the web sites developed with cherrypy should be
covered by GPL. He just don't want anyone to create a commercial
version of CherryPy.

I'm not sure the licence he uses reflects his wishes though...
And one day, in the future, what Remi stated in 2002 might
not be of much value. Someone else might be the copyright
holder by then, and interpret the GPL differently.

In other words, these licence issues are difficult for the
software writers, as well as for the software users...

Way-off-topic-but-it-concerns-us-ly yours,

Magnus


-- 
Magnus Lycka, Thinkware AB
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phone: int+46 70 582 80 65, fax: int+46 70 612 80 65
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