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On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 19:47, Robin Cornelius wrote:
Hi all, I am feeling a bit annoyed at the moment as a peice of software i use to use has suddenly become totaly closed source/commercial. Now the software was never GPL or anything like that but it was free and the source was avaible, there use to be a good community on yahoo groups for its support but all this has slowly been removed. ....
It may be open source, it may be free (as in beer) but for freedom you need GPL.... As only when you have GPL will you be protected from this sort of hijacking.... This is why a certain company beginning with M favours BSD over GNU/Linux.
I am extra annoyed as i contributed some very useful parts to this software (mostly bolting on LUA scripting). Luckly i still have a copy of the prog but not any recent source code. I hope i have horribly misunderstood the situation (which is why i will not give the name or web address) but i think i should investigate just how much the software is integrate with LUA and a third-partys software as these might be GPL licenced and therefor the main app might now be breaking the GPL.
There could be a cross licensing issue here .... if parts of the software are under someone else's copyright then the "company" would have no choice but to close the source (other than rewriting the non free bits and GPL'ing them. Also note that libraries tend to be licensed under LGPL which is less restrictive / more restrictive depending on your point of view, however it does allow commercials to contribute non GPL code (not necessarily source) that will run on GNU/Linux.
I think the GPL may be intact by the fact that a "demo" version is avaible but this lacks one important (external) component that is required to do anything useful with the software. The external component is a finite element solver and is totaly standalone , processing output files of the system and the solver dosn't use any GPL code or libs so i think they have won :-(
Perhaps this component is the very one that is licensed / closed source . If the rest of it can be given away freely then perhaps the first step is to get the company to agree its release what it can under GPL. Then ask the community for assistance in writing the missing link. This is very much why Sun went down the route of splitting StarOffice (Sun's own brand) and OpenOffice which is the true GPL'd version. StarOffice retains certain components that will probably never ever be GPL.
That will learn me not to specificly put GPL headers on the top of my contributed source code!
Yep good lesson learnt (says he frantically looking through his dismally small amount of code to ensure that he has done likewise). You have probably just discovered the difference between Open Source and free (as in freedom) software, that is a GPL licence. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.