Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 22:35:30 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jgrosch@MooseRiver.com Cc: dyson@iquest.net, brett@lariat.org, tlambert@primenet.com, jkh@zippy.cdrom.com, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: O'Reilly article: Whence the Source: Untangling the Open Source/Free Software Debate Message-ID: <199903132235.PAA22386@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990313080537.B44604@ontario.mooseriver.com> from "Josef Grosch" at Mar 13, 99 08:05:37 am
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> Another point to keep in mind is that the entire GPL and BSD license issues > can be rendered moot by a large corporation willing to spend the money on > lawyers. If, to randomly pull a large corporate name out of the air, > General Electric was using GPL tools to manufacture product and was not > living up to the specifics of GPL, according to Stallman, by not shipping > source code with the product, there is little Stallman, the FSF, and Linux > fanatics, etc. could do about it. GE could just bury Stallman and the FSF > in legal expenses. GE probably has legal department of over 1000 people > including several hundred lawyers and para-legals. I know for a fact that companies like Sun, HP, IBM, and Microsoft *will not* ship a product which utilizes GPL'ed components in combination with non-GPL'ed components. The fear is not for their source code, it is for the erosion of their patents by their utilization in code which is GPL'ed. There are a number of serious problems with the concept of "mere agregation", which feed this fear, as does the lack of explicit acknowledgement of dynamic linking technology in the LGPL. I think the currently largest worry in this regard is GPL'ed or LGPL'ed JAVA code, and what it means when you instance a class, "compile" JAVA to bytecode, or compile JAVA to native code on a platform, when one or more of the classes is GPL'ed or LGPL'ed. What does it mean to your JAVA code when, for example, you use the Kaffe implementation of the JAVA base JDK classes? The trouble here is that the GPL and LGPL don't specifically address the issue of what constitues an image or agregation in the case of an interpreted runtime environment (another reason interpreters cause problems, above and beyond their insistance that all languages be declarative). One could make a similar fear-inducing argument with regard to shell scripts that use shell built-in's being run under bash (for example). The corporate view is that it has to be severable. The Linux shipped on HP, Sun, and IBM equipment will not have any company provided code in it, above and beyond the base Linux. Don't expect Sun's Linux to have a full streams implementation, or DECNet, for example. 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-advocacy" in the body of the message
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