IANAL. Take my answers below with a grain of salt.
On Monday 21 June 2004 04:04 am, Paul Smith wrote:
> There are several possibilities I've come up with:
> - add support for our software to either load libclamav or talk to clamd
> directly, if those things are installed. This seems to me that we'd then
> need to make our software GPLed - which isn't acceptable for us
Understandable.
> - our software supports 'shim' DLLs with a standard interface which can
> talk to a third party antivirus product to add the capability for more
> virus scanners without recompilation. WE could make one of those to talk to
> clamav instead. That shim DLL could then be GPLed without a problem for us.
> But, then, because our email server software would dynamically load the
> shim, which is GPLed, our server would have to be GPLed as well... Again,
> not acceptable.
no, the GPL allows for private license agreements. Simply license the shim to
yourself, done.
> - we could, simply, not support ClamAV :-( But then, someone else might
> come along and write a shim for it - they'd have to GPL the shim - then
> because our software would dynamically link to it, would our software need
> to be GPLed??
that would be horribly infectious. That's like saying "Ooo, I wrote an GPL'd
for outlook, now microsoft has to give me their source!"
I think having a "shim" is how a lot of closed-source projects handle these
types of situations. You simply write a piece of software, GPL it, license
it to yourself for commercial use, bam.
> (Is talking to clamd different from loading libclamav? So, if we talk to
> clamd using TCP/IP would that infer the GPL requirement or not?)
well, I think you're getting overly paranoid here. non-GPL software can most
certainly take advantage of executables and services provided by GPL'ed
software. My ftp client is GPL (lftp), yet I can connect to microsoft's ftp
server without them having to give me their source code.
by "different" I assume you mean in a legal sense, not in functionality.
Obviously loading the clamav library and keeping the virus databases in
memory would be a lot faster than running clamscan all of the time (talking
to clamd is far more efficient, but if you can keep it all in house you can
get more performance, generally)
-Jeremy
--
Jeremy Kitchen ++ Systems Administrator ++ Inter7 Internet Technologies, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ++ www.inter7.com ++ 866.528.3530 ++ 847.492.0470 int'l
kitchen @ #qmail #gentoo on EFnet ++ scriptkitchen.com/qmail
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