Request: Summary of GPL Problems
Andrew C. Greenberg
werdna at mucow.com
Tue Nov 13 20:45:45 UTC 2001
On Monday, November 12, 2001, at 11:40 PM, Russell Allen wrote:
> 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?
Squeak (or any other open source Smalltalk model) is an excellent
example where GPL fails in an open source context. You cannot include
GPL code in a monolithic image combined with non-GPL code and distribute
the same. Accordingly, Smalltalkers not working exclusively in
GPL-based systems face constant license-lawyering, wondering whether the
next bit of code violates some or another license.
RMS recognized early on that distributions of GPL with unrelated
(non-derivative) non-GPL code, and their coexistence on a single system
and ability to run on a non-GPL'd OS, was essential for workers in the
real world. The problem is that the exception presumes the traditional
Unix-based OS/application dichotomy, which has no meaning in a
monolithic image model (indeed, Squeak need not even run under an OS).
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