From: Daniel Carrera Date: 2003-07-09T11:07:13+09:00 Subject: Re: My brief and torrid affair with Ruby. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 10:57:11AM +0900, Stephyn Butcher wrote: > They don't call GPL a legal virus for nothing: > The GPL is *not* viral. It is a license. You either take it or you don't. The GPL does not magically alter the licensing of your work, copyright law just doesn't do that. GPL estipulates as a condition that if you make a derivative work you have to release it as GPL. This is NOT the same thing as making your derivative work GPL without your concent. Your derivative work is yours, and copyright law cannot change how you choose to release it. Rather, if you release something including GPL code under a non-GPL license, you are in violation of the GPL license and you must correct the situation. One way to correct the situation is to change the license of your work. Another, is to stop using the GPL code whose license you are not complying with. The GPL does NOT hope over to other people's code. It is not viral. It's a license. If you don't like it you don't use it. But it will NOT force something on you. Contrast this with the "Shared Source" license which does effectively contaminate the developer (not the code, the developer) since it prevents the developer from using ideas from the code as inspiration for later work (the GPL, does not restrict this, only the copying of code). - -- Daniel Carrera | OpenPGP fingerprint: Graduate TA, Math Dept | 6643 8C8B 3522 66CB D16C D779 2FDD 7DAC 9AF7 7A88 UMD (301) 405-5137 | http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/pgp.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (SunOS) iD8DBQE/C3jKnxE8DWHf+OcRAn8YAJ9RaGjolKSOWIlysKeSWi12vpMOoQCfQhd3 FLsOeq+rmnAptjfBUq67AJ8= =IIKf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----