On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 01:25:42AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > There are clearly about six different "ASP loopholes" confusing this > discussion. :) I propose from now on that people stop saying "the ASP > loophole" as if there were only one. David Turner contends that the > real problem is web-only applications, I assumed you meant "GPL'd > client, proprietary web app", and actually you mean "GPL'd web app, > proprietary client". > > But I'm not sure I understand even now the specific case you are > speaking of. Still, I think there is a good rule here:
Well, I'll call the one I described the "RPC loophole", unless someone comes up with something better. Take any library; convert it to an RPC interface, where instead of linking directly to the library, you make requests over a network, and all of the code is executed entirely on the remote system. Only the (eg.) function parameters and return values go over the network. So, someone does this to a GPL library, which was intended by the author to have source be available to anyone using it. However, now you're linking against it without actually having been given a copy at all; just a reference to some generic interface, and a URL to the running implementation. Since you never got a copy, nobody has any obligation to provide you with source. -- Glenn Maynard
