At 04:44 PM 07/19/2000 -0400, you wrote:

>My reading says that if your product ships with TheirSql, you must
>publish it. If you require your users to find their own copy of
>TheirSql, you may be OK.

I am pretty sure about this. If you ship theirSQL you must include the
source for theirSQL but you are under no obligation to disclose the source
of your own efforts. If you write your code from scratch it can not be
considered a derived work and is not subject to the licensing requirements
of their code. This makes sense.

>As a developer myself, my interest in getting tangled in the GPL
>is goose egg zero. I'm particularly irked when the GNU guys apply
>their license to code intentionally and explicitly in the public
>domain.

This also makes sense. If you release your code to the public domain you
are in fact saying "I don't care what happens to this code", to a lesser
extent the same applies to BSD style licenses. They allow you to use their
code to make proprietary closed source programs. The GNU people are
perfectly within their rights to take this code re-release it under GPL.
This is similar to apple taking Freebsd, modifying it and re-releasing it
under their own license. The GNU people OTOH don't want you to take their
code and relicense it or make it proprietary. So they put a condition in
their license that says if you benefit from our hard labor you must also
let other people benefit from your hard labor. In a way this is the cost
of using GPLed code. You are still free not use their code however.

I have never written anything from scratch that I have GPLed but I have
made use of GPLed code. In my case I modified the PHPDB code to accomodate
interbase. Because I took their code and modified it I am obligated to
release my modifications under the GPL if I ever distribute this object (I
will very soon BTW). I of course don't mind in the least because the PHPDB
folks saved me days of work.


:wq
Tim Uckun
Due Diligence Inc. http://www.diligence.com/ Americas Background
Investigation Expert.
If your company isn't doing background checks, maybe you haven't considered
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