On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Craig R Hughes wrote: > It's hard, since the GPL is incompatible with the Artistic license, and > I think there are a lot of people who use SA who are presently extending > it in ways which are compatible with the SA license, but not with the > GPL (they don't want to release source back, or want to make their own > local rule changes).
On Sat, 20 Apr 2002, Rick Macdougall wrote: > [...] even if SpamAssassin was GPL'd, people making mods internally > would not have to release the source to anyone unless they made the > product publicly accessable or sold it to a 3rd party (and that 3rd > party would have the choice on if they wanted to release those changes > or not). Right; the GPL doesn't require you to expose to any third party any changes that you make; it just requires you to provide the source code if and when you do expose changes to a third party. E.g., using emacs doesn't require you to send your .emacs file to the FSF. Back to Craig again: > I think some of those people would get quite uncomfortable with GPL'd > bits in the package. It's sort of unclear to me what the implications > of that might be too -- would "GPL cancer" eat the whole project the > minute a piece of it uses GPL code? And Rick: > An add on module to Spam Assassin (IMHO) would not make SpamAssassin a > GPL'd product, just that module [...] This, on the other hand, is not clear. The GPL attempts to apply to the algorithms used in the code as well as to the literal code itself; some people interpret this to mean that if you so much as look at a piece of GPL'd code, you might accidentally learn something, which, if it later affected the way you wrote some other piece of code, would mean that the code you wrote was now also GPL'd. This is obviously a very paranoid interpretation, but not unheard-of. > My basic understanding is, if the product does not require the GPL > module to perform or run, then the product retains it's original license > even though some modules may be GPL'd. (Example, mod_ssl for Apache. > Mod_ssl is a bsd license and Apache is the Apache license) None of the QT, XFree, Apache or BSD licenses is "viral" in the way that the GPL is, so you can't really use those as examples. -- Bart (Not a Lawyer Either) Schaefer _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
