Bart Schaefer wrote: BS> On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Craig R Hughes wrote: BS> > It's hard, since the GPL is incompatible with the Artistic license, and BS> > I think there are a lot of people who use SA who are presently extending BS> > it in ways which are compatible with the SA license, but not with the BS> > GPL (they don't want to release source back, or want to make their own BS> > local rule changes). BS> BS> On Sat, 20 Apr 2002, Rick Macdougall wrote: BS> > [...] even if SpamAssassin was GPL'd, people making mods internally BS> > would not have to release the source to anyone unless they made the BS> > product publicly accessable or sold it to a 3rd party (and that 3rd BS> > party would have the choice on if they wanted to release those changes BS> > or not). BS> BS> Right; the GPL doesn't require you to expose to any third party any BS> changes that you make; it just requires you to provide the source code if BS> and when you do expose changes to a third party. BS> BS> E.g., using emacs doesn't require you to send your .emacs file to the FSF.
I'm not sure what the GPL requires of you if you modify config files which interact programmatically with GPLed code, then allow end users to modify those config files to adapt the way their email is processed. In the case of SA, the config files are really more or less part of the program code. Does that mean ISPs would have to make their changes to the code available to their customers, if those customers are allowed to edit their user_prefs? BS> Back to Craig again: BS> BS> > I think some of those people would get quite uncomfortable with GPL'd BS> > bits in the package. It's sort of unclear to me what the implications BS> > of that might be too -- would "GPL cancer" eat the whole project the BS> > minute a piece of it uses GPL code? BS> BS> And Rick: BS> BS> > An add on module to Spam Assassin (IMHO) would not make SpamAssassin a BS> > GPL'd product, just that module [...] BS> BS> This, on the other hand, is not clear. The GPL attempts to apply to the BS> algorithms used in the code as well as to the literal code itself; some BS> people interpret this to mean that if you so much as look at a piece of BS> GPL'd code, you might accidentally learn something, which, if it later BS> affected the way you wrote some other piece of code, would mean that the BS> code you wrote was now also GPL'd. IANAL, but there I think the GPL is SOL. If you didn't patent the algorithm, you're fucked. And in some jurisdictions, you can't patent the algorithm. The problem I'm more concerned with is the config-file-is-code one which is a feature of many Perl programs, combined with section 2(b) of the GPL which says that you must apply the GPL to any work "that in whole or in part _contains_ or is derived from" GPLed code (my underlining). My reading of that is that containing a GPLed piece in the distribution of a greater package requires the greater package to carry the GPL. This is different from the LGPL which allows modules to form a part of non GPLed bigger things. The last bit of section 2 seems to say that you can distribute the GPLed module separately from the non-GPLed part, and then avoid being compelled to GPL the whole thing, but if you package them together, the whole enchilada need to carry the GPL. Section 10 sounds like the ideal solution to the problem though. BS> > My basic understanding is, if the product does not require the GPL BS> > module to perform or run, then the product retains it's original license BS> > even though some modules may be GPL'd. (Example, mod_ssl for Apache. BS> > Mod_ssl is a bsd license and Apache is the Apache license) BS> BS> None of the QT, XFree, Apache or BSD licenses is "viral" in the way that BS> the GPL is, so you can't really use those as examples. Well, some would say they're intellectually viral -- once you use a BSD-style license, it's hard to switch back to anything else ;) But let's not descend into religious warfare. C _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
