IANAL, but my understanding is that the licensing of the code that William wrote for the servers that run SMC would only be relevant if the code is distributed.
That is, the license of a software is an agreement that happens in the moment of the distribution. The license stablishes the conditions for both the distributer and the receiver of the copy. If there is no distribution (that is, if the software is only used by its creator), it makes no sense to talk about the license. In fact, if the problem is that the GPL demands that the code that links against it is GPL, William could state that his code is also GPL; just he would not distribute it to anybody. That does not violate the GPL. GPL does not force you to distribute the code, just forces you to distribute it in source form IF you distribute it in binary form. On the other hand, ii recall William saying that keeping the high availability code of SMC for his own was a condition that UW imposed for funding it. If some day William, or the UW decides to license his code to somebody, we can talk about the legality of the license chosen, depending on how it links to GPL code. But as long as that licensing does not happen, i see no violation of GPL at all, neither in the letter nor in the spirit. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
