Software Licenses [djg34]

[Dan Odom]

David Garfield Said:

> I believe Borland's policy is that you may transfer you software from 
> one machine to another, PROVIDED you remove all copies from the 
> original machine.  Thus, you may use it like you would use a book.  
> You may pass it around, but only one person can have it at any one 
> time.  

It may be installed on more than one machine at a time (e.g., your
home and your office), but it can only be in use on one machine at a
time.

> The GNU policy is the so called "Copyleft", more formally the GNU 
> General Public License.  I believe it policy is basically, "If it 
> includes ANY GNU code, it is FREE SOFTWARE and you must give source 
> when you give an executable.  The particularly NASTY part about this 
> is that it applies to the C run time libraries.  I do not believe that 
> it applies to the output of the compiler if it did not apply to the 
> input.  This should make the GNU compilers/assemblers usable by us.  

<sigh>  One of GNU's chief complaints is that people often
misinterpret the GPL this way.

>From Section 6, Paragraph 1 of the GNU Library General Public
License, Version 2 of June 1991:

``A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library,
but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or liked
with it, is called a ``work that uses the Library''.  Such a work, in
isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore
falls outside the scope of this license.''

>From Section 7, Paragraph 1:

``As an exception to the Sections above, you may also compile or link
a ``work that uses the Library'' with the Library to produce a work
containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under
terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification and
reverse engineering for debugging and such modifications.''

So you see, Moose could be _commercial_ and legally make use of GNU
libraries.  All we have to do is allow the `customer' to modify it...

It's good that this license stuff is coming up now... I'd hate for
Moose to be completed before we discover that we all want distribution
on different terms.

I have two requirements for the Moose license:  Moose must be free,
and the source code to Moose must be freely available.  That's it.
When I joined the project I got the impression that both of the above
would apply, so I'm not too worried about it.

Before you jump down my throat about commercial software, let me say
that I am NOT opposed to copyright on individual programs, and neither
is the League for Programming Freedom.  Hell, I make my (meager)
living off of software.  The reason that I want Moose
to be free has to do with the kind of people who tend to use free
software...  Think of all the gurus you've known, and of how many used
SysV over the (free) Berkely UNIX.  On the PC, most (if not all) of
the Truly Great people I've known used Linux/Minix rather than SCO or
QNX.  I don't want some accountant running Lotus 1-2-3 on Moose; I'd
rather have some student running his cryptanalysis software on it.

-- 
Dan Odom
danodom@matt.ksu.ksu.edu -- Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS

Support the League for Programming Freedom.  Mail lpf@uunet.uu.net