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On Wednesday 08 September 2004 7:47 pm, 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
free as in the Palm SDK is free (with a restrictive licence but free of charge)? What was the licence? (off-list URL if you like).
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. The software is written by a single author
in the main, but s/he obviously accepted contributions from others. Are you in touch with any of those others?
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.
Your copyright is still in effect - they cannot reproduce that without your permission, unless you signed that away under a non-free licence. What was the original licence? LUA appears to be a BSD-type free-for-all licence - there's nothing to stop the commercialisation and restriction of that type of content, as Microsoft already prove. There are no royalties or GNU-like "copyleft" restrictions. Lua qualifies as Open Source software. Its licenses are compatible with GPL. http://www.lua.org/license.html 'compatible' in this case meaning that it can be incorporated into GPL programs - it's certainly not GPL itself, or even LGPL. In your case, it is precisely the copyleft that you would like to retain. http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCWhatDoesCompatMean you can combine code released under the other license with code released under the GNU GPL in one larger program. The GPL permits such a combination provided it is released under the GNU GPL. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too.
I hope i have horribly misunderstood the situation (which is why i will not give the name or web address)
off-list?
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.
You certainly need to know if the original licence stripped you of your copyright upon submission and exactly where you stand. Certainly there is nothing about LUA that prevents other programmers writing in LUA to make their contributions GPL.
I think the GPL may be intact by the fact that a "demo" version is avaible
"But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL." http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic Any release of modified GPL code must be under the GPL - demo versions are not an exception. You need to absolutely certain of your ground here.
but this lacks one important (external) component that is required to do anything useful with the software.
Closed modifications are fine - the moment ANY GPL code is modified AND RELEASED (including as a binary or as part of a whole), it must be released under the GPL or the GPL is violated. That's what Microsoft termed 'cancerous'.
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 :-(
If any of those contributions were GPL, they've lost. Irrespective of the bolt-on bit - that can always be reverse engineered or even forked (as you have old source code for it?). It all comes back to the original question: What, EXACTLY, was in the licence?
That will learn me not to specificly put GPL headers on the top of my contributed source code!
Which editor/IDE do you use? Many will do it for you with every new file. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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