From: Mark Hahn <mchahn@...>
Date: 2001-11-08T03:16:05+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24550] RE:  Final word on rdtool vs. doxygen licensing


You can argue that "it doesn't matter" or "everyone does it" but that will
not change the reality that GPL is a big problem.  This is not an academic
issue.  Most non-linux based companies will never touch a GPL license.
Companies avoiding Ruby is a serious practical problem, no matter what the
legal arguments are.

P.S.  It is not polite to claim you have the "final word" on a topic of open
discussion.  That is an attempt to hamper discussion.

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Lee Green [mailto:eric@badtux.org]
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 9:52 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: [ruby-talk:24546] Final word on rdtool vs. doxygen licensing


Bluntly: It's not an issue, except in the minds of certain licensing
fanatics
with an ideological axe to grind. It is quite legal to call external
programs
(such as doxygen) that are GPL'ed, without GPL'ing your product. Virtually
every proprietary program on Linux calls GPL'ed external programs at least
in
their installer (which is generally a shell script, which calls the GPL'ed
GNU 'awk', 'sed', 'test', etc. programs). Anybody who says this is a problem
is grinding an ideological axe rather than a legal one. The Ruby code that
does this (calls the external program) can be released under any license we
wish -- including a proprietary license, if so desired. We have 7 years of
commercial software experience on the Linux platform showing that this is
so.
Even RMS agrees with this position, because it increases the number of
GPL'ed
programs, which is his main goal. 'Nuff said.

Let's get on with discussing the technical merits, such as, e.g., is doxygen
cross-platform? Are there better documentation systems out there? Would it
be
technically better to improve rdtool rather than move to a different system?
Etc. etc. etc.

--
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