Request: Summary of GPL Problems

David Chase chase at world.std.com
Tue Nov 13 19:36:15 UTC 2001


At 02:40 PM 11/13/2001 +1000, Russell Allen wrote:
>David Chase <chase at world.std.com> wrote:
>> Supposing I took a piece of GPL code and combined it with a piece
>> of (say) proprietary code that forbids source redistribution.
>
>[snip]
>
>> Can I release the resulting binary?  If I do, GPL says I must make
>> source available to ALL code linked (combined) into the binary; this
>> would include the proprietary code whose license forbids redistribution.
>> Therefore, if I release the code, I must violate (at least) one license,
>> hence I cannot legally release the code.
>
>Isn't this just an intended result of the GPL?

Yes and no.  The intended result of the GPL is free access to code.
The GPL is not necessarily the only license that achieves this goal,
but (because of the way it is written, and I don't entirely see a
way around this) it acts to exclude other licenses.  It's not black
or white, evil/proprietary versus good/GPL -- there's a bunch of
different ways to distribute code, everything from public domain,
to "freely distributable" (see fdlibm, gdtoa), to BSD, GPL, artistic
license, SCSL, etc, etc.

>Assuming that I am not going to worry too much about making life easy
>for people who want to make proprietary versions of my code, is there a
>situation where GPLing my code will impede the use of that code by other
>researchers?

Sure.  Supposing I need good floating point formatting and transcendentals,
and I grab fdlibm and gdtoa -- not public domain, not GPL.  The default
answer to any "can I combine code with X license and GPL" question must
be "NO", lacking time and money spent obtaining legal advice and perhaps
negotiating with one or both parties, because the GPL demands redistribution
under GPL terms.  It may be that someone has done the footwork in the
case of those two pieces of code, but as a general rule, if a piece of
code has any other non-GPL license on it, it cannot (default answer)
be combined with GPL code and distributed.

The researchers I have worked with over the years have not released ANY
of their software under GPL, nor have I.  Mine typically says something
like:

/*
Copyright (C) 1986 by David R. Chase, Rice University, Houston, Texas, U.S.A.
All rights reserved.
This code may be freely used and distributed if this copyright
notice is maintained.
*/

I didn't intend it to be much a restriction, but it demands something
of redistribution (preservation of THIS copyright notice) and if I
saw my code appear in some GPL'd thing w/o my copyright, I would
complain.



David Chase
chase at naturalbridge.com
drchase at alumni.rice.edu
chase at world.std.com






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