Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 21:49:42 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: wes@softweyr.com (Wes Peters) Cc: julian@elischer.org (Julian Elischer), jkh@zippy.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard), freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Licensing (no longer Re: Shells) Message-ID: <200004192149.OAA05147@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <38FA5D6E.AE039BE9@softweyr.com> from "Wes Peters" at Apr 16, 2000 06:40:14 PM
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> Julian Elischer wrote: > > Wes Peters wrote: > > > > > > I have been a bash user for many years, but would not want to put bash > > > in an embedded system for fear of contaminating the code base; Julian's > > > point is well founded. > > > > consider a 'crunched' binary including bash and a proprietary > > program. Instant GPL pollution of proprietary program. > > Depending on the court's interpretation of "derived work" you might not > even have to do that. I have been given an opinion by members of the > legal staff of a large US-based semiconductor manufacturer that making > any single-purpose box that requires GPL code to function means the > entire product is a work derived from the GPL code. Instant pollution > of everything in the box. This is what Terry Lambert refers to as the > viral nature of the GPL. Brett Glass calls it viral; I just call it a poor instrumentality of the GNU Manifesto, and leave it at that. As far as embedded systems, the GPL is death. If you want to say "being bought" as one of your protential exit strategies in your new startup, so that "IPO" is not your only option, to better convince the V.C.'s that they should invest in it, the GPL is death. You can still convince some V.C.'s, of course, but you've artificially limited your options considerably. I _do_ worry about things like the Kaffe class (Klass?) libraries being under GPL, since I don't know what an agregation means in the context of a bytecode interpreter; I'm sure the problem becomes much worse if you enable the JIT when running. The LGPL would have been a much better choice for these people getting their product used everywhere, but that might not have been one of their goals. Not that this has piss-all to do with -arch, so follows are directed to -chat. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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