This seems like pretty safe ground to me. Of course what constitutes a "derived work" is and will always be subject to legal interpretation, And I do think what you "distribute" and how you distribute it will make a big difference. But something that communicates over an internet protocol with another service, can hardly be considered part of the product you've distributed. Particularly if the spec for the web service is not proprietary. The service your consuming hasn't necessarily been distributed (and often isn't). This is probably the crux of the static vs, .dll difference in some peoples (lawyers or not) interpretation. Just how stand- alone does a library need to be in order to be considered an independent work vs. a derived work? Would a reasonable person believe that some other individual could write a replacement "library"? Would they be able to distribute it as a standalone product? I'd be interested to see how an interpretive api that was written so that anyone can register a callback and therefor inerface with the module would measure up in this interpretation, but as Larry hints at... that's probably best left to a real lawyer. I once attended a talk by a copyright lawyer on the subject, and in the states at least, most software licensing is considered contract law, and not copyright law, so the interface gets muddy in a hurry, particularly around commercial software. From a legal perspective you don't own your copy of MS word in the states. You've just purchased (read rented) the rights to use it. The real question in all this isn't which interpretation is right or wrong, but rather what level of risk is drupal.org willing to accept. That interpretation ought to be somewhat conservative IMHO. But I think web services are safe, if the spec is open. Enough of this, I'm going to write some more code :) Dave On Aug 31, 2007, at 5:31 PM, Larry Garfield wrote:
On Friday 31 August 2007, Thomas Barregren wrote:
So, if you want to build a module that can be used to integrate a software with a license incompatible with GPL, I *believe* that a solution is to build a GPLed Service Provider Interface (SPI) which makes no assumption about the internals of the service providers.
Regards, Thomas
So you are claiming, then, that a Drupal wrapper module for a non- GPLed system that communicated only via REST calls (or similar) but still had no actual function of its own without that non-GPLed system, is legal?
Just for the record, how many of the people in this thread actually *are* lawyers? :-)
-- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson