Re: Open source licensing issues (was: Calling a program without knowing the parms)

On Friday 06 July 2001 13:38, boldt@ca.ibm.com wrote:
<snipped>
> By all means, look at the details of each license before choosing one.
> Regarding the "poison pill" nature of the GPL, you might want to
> consider the LGPL, or "library GPL".  LGPL is a looser form of the GPL
> that allows linking your open source library to other code without
> requiring that other code to also follow the same license.  Thus,
> commercial products can link to an LGPL-licensed library.
>
> From an RPG point of view (this is RPG400-L after all!), bound calls
> would require something like LGPL for the linked module, or else the
> whole program would have to have an open-source license.  However, for
> dynamic calls (and probably calls to service programs), calling GPL
> code should be allowed from non-GPL programs.  (IANAL, though.)

There has been a recent addition to the GNU GPL site in the form of an 
extensive FAq - see 
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html 
For the subject Hans mentions above I think this is the closest match
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

From my reading of it, Hans has got the distinction spot on. I've a 
personal interest in this as I chose the GPL as the license for the free 
software I write for the AS/400. My take is that if you can run a GPL'd 
routine from the command line then you should be 'safe' running it from a 
proprietary routine. As there is quite an architectural difference 
between the iSeries platform and everything_is_a_file Unices (Linux 
included), I'm not sure where 'shared address space' comes into it - does 
starting a new activation group mean routines don't share the address 
space - or are these terms just not applicable to OS/400 (displaying my 
lack of understanding of ILE again :( ) Would you be able to elaborate at 
all, Hans?

I'd be very interested on other peoples thoughts on licenses, 
particularly those who release the code to their applications (whether 
free or otherwise) - email me privately if you don't think it's suitably 
on topic for RPG400-L.

Regards, Martin
-- 
martin@dbg400.net / jamaro@firstlinux.net
http://www.dbg400.net  DBG/400 - DataBase Generation utilities 
Open Source test environment tools for the AS/400 / iSeries and 
miscellaneous database & spooled file management commands.
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