Larry Garfield skrev:
On Friday 31 August 2007, Thomas Barregren wrote:
Suppose you have a GPLed program A and another program B. The fact that A depends on B (or vice versa) is not enough to trigger the requirement that B also is GPLed. For an example it is perfect legal to let B be non GPLed if A use fork and exec and similar mechanisms to call B. A special case of this proviso is the "web service loophole". It is only if A uses a function, an object or some other internals of B, or vice versa, that B is required to be GPLed. Thus, for any construction where A and B can collaborate without knowing or assuming anything about each others internals, it is acceptable that B isn't GPLed.
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?
Yes, I think so.
Just for the record, how many of the people in this thread actually *are* lawyers? :-)
Probably none. I am for sure not a lawyer. But for what it is worth, I have more than ten years of professional experience of reading and writing contracts and licenses. I am not an expert. But I have learned a lot, and think of myself as quite well versed in these issues. Especially when it comes to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licensing, which I have taken a great interest in for several years. For those who are interesting to learn more in this interesting field, I can recommend following books (available free on-line): * http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm * http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/book/ Best regards, Thomas