[sldev] Fwd: [Opensim-dev] Violating the GPL by looking (Re: Voice Module)

Argent Stonecutter secret.argent at gmail.com
Wed Mar 19 11:36:09 PDT 2008


On 2008-03-19, at 11:41, Robin Cornelius wrote:
> The viewer code is GPL so yes this
> would then force the GPL on top of opensim and this would mean that
> anyone making a derived version of opensim would have to publish there
> source as per the GPL. The only person who could get sued in such a
> situation is if one took opensim (that had some gpl code) and
> developed a product and did not publish there changes. No one just
> developing opensim would be effected by this in anyway.

Except the ones who believed they were contributing to a project  
under one license and suddenly found that it was under a different  
license. Also, there are commercial products that are compatible with  
the BSD license but not with the GPL. To distribute a product using  
these commercial APIs is not possible under the GPL.

Incidentally, one example of this is Quicktime on Windows. It is not  
actually legal to distribute a product that calls the Quicktime API  
under the GPL2, unless that product *only* runs on OS X (where  
Quicktime is distributed with the OS).

> It is possible to take GPL code into a BSD project but the GPL and BSD
> licences must BOTH be followed. At any point GPL code could be removed
> from the project by anyone and the BSD license is still 100% intact
>
> Its *MUCH* harder to take BSD in to a GPL project as some of the
> freedoms of BSD is lost by the GPL requirement that code must be
> shared so i believe this would breach the BSD license.

Um, no, that's not the case at all. There's nothing in the current  
BSD license that is incompatible with the GPL2, and I don't believe  
there's anything incompatible with the GPL3. Not only that, but these  
two situations are identical from a licensing point of view: they are  
both creating a derived work covered by both licenses.

> So i really can't see the issue here. I would say lift any code you
> need and develop opensim faster and with less pain and get the added
> benift that the GPL would stop "J random company" from taking opensim
> adding loads of features and developing a commercial project without
> contributing the code back to the community. Unless thats what you
> want?

That's what some people want, yes. Others want to be able to  
distribute products that contain both open source and closed-source  
code. You don't happen to consider these important or even desirable,  
that's fine, just be aware that there are people who have other goals.



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