[Mailman-Developers] XML-RPC interface to mailman

[Barry Warsaw]

On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 02:08, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Unfortunately, linking is not a necessary condition for a program to
> be a derivative work, merely a sufficient one.  I would suspect that
> Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen will tell you that anything with
> "RPC" in its name should be presumed to create derivative works until
> proven otherwise.  After all, the whole point of any "remote procedure
> call" protocol to allow the moral equivalent of linking without actually
> sharing memory cells.

Isn't this a gray area that the GPL 3 is trying to clarify?  I agree
that the patch probably needs to be licensed under the GPL (and
unfortunately assigned to the FSF) to be integrated into Mailman, but to
provide XMLRPC services to a Mailman server probably does not require
the client to be GPL'd.  

I wouldn't call it "linking" any more than trying to require GPL web
browsers to connect to a GPL web server via the "linking" rule.  That my
own opinion, and I don't know what the FSF would say.

Joseph, the best thing to do is to post your patches on SourceForge. 
It's way to easy for them to get lost in the archives (or <shudder>, my
inbox).

-Barry

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