From: Eric Lee Green <eric@...>
Date: 2001-11-08T02:28:35+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24542] Re: kill rdtool?

On Wednesday 07 November 2001 10:14 am, Mark Hahn wrote:
> I don't see how you could integrate (the I in IDE) the doc system in an IDE
> without calling the doc system.

Same way that I integrated 'mtx' into BRU-Pro -- just call it as a 
stand-alone program from your Ruby script, the same way you might call 'awk' 
or 'sed' (both of which are GPL on Linux). BRU-Pro "looked" to the user as if 
it were a single integrated backup program, but actually it was a ton of 
Python scripts and standalone Open Source programs being called as individual 
stand-alone programs from a GUI "shell" that presented an integrated user 
environment. The user never saw that behind the scenes, "mtx" was being 
called from the Python code to load and unload tapes and query the jukebox 
for its contents. The user never saw that, behind the scenes, hitting the 
"Backup" button on the GUI spawned off a seperate process that in turn called 
the GPL'ed "tapeinfo" program to detirmine whether there was a tape in the 
drive (since there is no cross-platform tape ioctl for detirmining such) and 
then called "mtx" to load a tape into the drive if there wasn't one there. 
All he saw was that the tape moved into the drive, and a status window popped 
up telling him how many files had been backed up so far. 

Really, you need to use some imagination here. I've "integrated" GPL'ed 
software into many of the commercial products that I've worked on, by simply 
extracting out the GPL'ed stuff into a seperate stand-alone program. Note 
that the GPL pretty much requires that the seperate stand-alone program be 
usable by itself without your IDE or product (much as "mtx" is), but that 
should not be much of a problem, and it doesn't even represent a competitive 
disadvantage in most cases -- as far as I know, no other backup software 
company uses "mtx" as their tape loader driver, they all rely upon their own 
proprietary drivers because that's what they have an investment in and 
because they have an institutional bias against Open Source software in the 
first place. 

> -----Original Message-----
> Why? As far as I know, there's no requirement for the doxygen system to be
> linked into your application. It's a stand-alone product. I've distributed
> GPL'ed software with commercial products before. See, e.g.,
> http://mtx.sourceforge.net, which serves as the tape jukebox driver for
> EST/TAPIS Group's BRU-Pro product.

-- 
Eric Lee Green          GnuPG public key at http://badtux.org/eric/eric.gpg
           mailto:eric@badtux.org  Web: http://www.badtux.org
             You do not save freedom by destroying freedom