From: droelke@rdxsunhost.aud.alcatel.com (Daniel R. Oelke)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 95 14:38:20 PDT
To: mix-l@jpunix.com
Subject: Re: Commercial Mixmaster (was Re: Mixmaster status)
Message-ID: <9509152138.AA02721@spirit.aud.alcatel.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



> With the caveat that I Am Not A Lawyer, it seems to me that the GNU General
> Public License (Version 1 from 1989, Mix/GNU.license in the Mixmaster .tar or 
> http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/docs/Gnu_License), which covers all extant 
> distributions of Mixmaster, has some significant implications for any
> commercial development of Mixmaster. It's applicable to "the Program or any 
> derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the
> Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or
> translated into another language". 
> 

Most common mis-understanding about the GPL.  If you GPL
something, *you* hold the copyright to the material, and
can still do anything you want with it.  See Perl for a good
example - released under an artistic license and under GPL.

GPL prevents *others* from making distributions without
distributing the source code.

Of course, if you accept GPL'ed patches to your code, the
whole thing gets messy, as now you can't claim complete
ownership of the entire code base.

I have simplified this - go to gnu.misc.discuss for a complete
rehash of this subject every 2-3 weeks.

Dan
------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Oelke                                  Alcatel Network Systems
droelke@aud.alcatel.com                             Richardson, TX