From: Mark Hahn Date: 2001-11-08T03:07:07+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:24549] RE: can GPL feature be a Ruby standard? (was: kill rdtool?) From the GPL faq: "By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program". ... "However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program". Your method of "hitting the "Backup" button on the GUI spawn(ing) off a seperate process that in turn called the GPL'ed "tapeinfo" program", could be argued to be "make them effectively a single program". I'm not saying it IS a violation of the GPL, just that it could be argued to be. What is "intimate enough" anyway? In the commercial world, the possibility of legal action is enough to be a show-stopper for a technology. Anyone can ship whatever they want and take a risk, but making something that is GPL part of a standard is forcing everyone to take that risk. --- Slightly off topic --- From "Why you shouldn't use the Library GPL for your next library" on GNU website: ... "We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition". This clearly states their attitude of "us versus them". GNU's intent is to hamper commercial software to the benefit of free software. -----Original Message----- From: Eric Lee Green [mailto:eric@badtux.org] Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 9:29 AM To: ruby-talk ML 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