| Paolo Bonzini 2005-09-28, 3:59 am |
| > I'm worried that your comment will be misinterpreted, Paolo. Any new
> files they make *are* under their copyright, and they *can* license
> them as they wish. It is just that they will be useless if they aren't
> licensed under the GPL, because nobody will have a license to use them
> with the GPL library they depend on.
To be even more precise, they aren't even useless if you aren't going
to distribute the program.
As David said, the GPL only covers distribution -- I should point out
that all my comments and claim were implying that the program is
distributed to its users. Otherwise, the whole discussion is moot
because, as David said, the GPL only covers distribution. Surely it
would not be incorrect to take a program that is not distributed, and
call it "proprietary software"; however I'd avoid it because
"proprietary software" is usually contrasted with "free software", and
the latter term is strictly related with *distribution* conditions).
You could call it in-house, or something like that.
There is actually a case when a software system is not really
distributed, yet it has (possibly a lot of) users, and from the users'
point of view it is about the same as a proprietary program: it is
actually quite an important one, i.e. network applications like web
services. People can use them without them being "distributed" in the
traditional sense. For this kind of application, in 2002 the FSF was
supporting the "Affero General Public License" (see
http://www.gnu.org/press/2002-03-19-Affero.html for more information),
but I don't know their current position.
Paolo
|