Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
Anyone have a version for dummies?
For example: when is using MySQl & PHP free to use?
When / why might one have to pay?
If so how much?
What obligations are there for people making things with
GNU GPL software?
What obligations are there for people making things with
GNU GPL software?
You can't link executable code under GPL license against non-GPL compatible licensed code. It is, it's forbidden by the license to make a shareware graphics editor that links against a GPL bitmap loader library without releasing your app as GPL compatible, to make the case the simplest possible.
On that case, you would simply write your own bitmap loading functions.
That's only with respect to compilable code; as to where I remember you have not a responsability of releasing interpreted scripts under GPL compatible just by using a GPL interpreter.
andreasfriedrich yes I am reading the FAQ I think it is my second read. I had started when I posted this but have not yet finished :-)
Duckula what I guess I don't yet concisely understand is the difference between:
1. Making something which itself becomes licenceable under the GNU GPL or which you are obliged by the terms to publicly release the source code for. and
2. Making something (a web application) which is simply using software provided under the GNU GPL for which one might want to charge clients for but not release source code (programming code) into the public domain.
Take the example that I want to construct a dynamic site based on PHP & MySQL. The site is for a business, in that way it will be a commercial application using GNU GPL software.
Does anyone involved in this site pay licence fees to use PHP & MySQL, is it the host, the site owner or the site builder?
The site develops and becomes ecommerce, for the sake of argument it is still coded in PHP & MySQL - are any licence fees payable? what and to whom?
The developer thinks - hey now I have a few modules of code I could use on other website applications and goes after new clients to apply the same code and GNU / GPL licence software.
The code involved in making the site now, does it have to be released into the public domain? do licence fees have to be paid?
As has already been mentioned, running interpreted code within a GPLed interpreter is completely free. Assuming that PHP actually is published under the GPL (Python has a more BSDish license, for example), you can still write and distribute your PHP programs under any license you like. The concept here is that your program is not "linked" with the interpreter, but is rather treated as data that gets "processed" by it. And no software license can remove your rights from your own data. The situation is even more obvious with MySQL.
Note that the opposite is not true. Releasing interpreted code (eg. Flash ActionScript) under the GPL makes it unuseable to anyone. Running such code would mean that it is executed within the address space of the closed source Flash player, which violates the GPL (you'd be surprised about the number of sourceforge projects that run into this dilemma).
What confuses me is when people say "free for personal use". This terminology has I think often been used to mean free for "not for profit" use meaning not free for corporations.
It seems the term "open source" is the more appropriate for GNU GPL as it implies meaning to the source code of these programs themselves must remain open and if you modify or improve on them then the terms require that you continue to make the source code available on the same terms.
In relation to GPL GNU it appears then that it is free for personal or commercial use and the source code can / is (usually) freely available.
Thus we can use these pieces of software to solve commercial applications such as web applications but the coding that we generate in php or mysql unless it modifies the basic programming of the source software is just data processed by the GNU GPL licensed software and therefore that data is copyrighted like any other? Am I right?
What I meant was of course running GPL code within an interpreter that is distributed under an incompatible license. Other examples would be Lisp code in Autocad, or actually anything in VB.
Hmmm... thinking of it, either I'm not understanding this aspect of the GPL correctly, or they simply didn't anticipate that combination could ever happen when they designed it. Guess we need more educated input before jumping to any conclusions here.
