Komodo in violation of Mozilla Public License? (fwd)

[Daniel Berlin]

barry at digicool.com (Barry A. Warsaw) writes:

> >>>>> "DEH" == Dennis E Hamilton <orcmid at email.com> writes:
> 
>     DEH> The MPL grants complete license to *use* the Covered Work or
>     DEH> a modification of the Covered Work, without restriction.
>     DEH> This is made very clear in section 2.1 of the license.  Any
>     DEH> code which is in some sense employed to operate the Covered
>     DEH> Work in some customized way is not subject to the MPL (unless
>     DEH> itself a Covered Work or modification thereof).
> 
>     DEH> This programmatic use (and what other kind is there, for
>     DEH> computer software -- when was the last time you communed
>     DEH> directly with an application program?  Actually, when was the
>     DEH> first time?) is simply and cleanly excluded from the reach of
>     DEH> the MPL.
> 
>     DEH> Now, this is not what is claimed for the GPL by the Free
>     DEH> Software Foundation.  For the GPL, the FSF argues that any
>     DEH> use is viral and the using program must be available under
>     DEH> the GPL.
> 
> I don't believe this.  In fact, section 0 of the GPL clearly says:
> 
>     Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are
>     not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.  The act
>     of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the
>     Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on
>     the Program (independent of having been made by running the
>     Program).  Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
> 
> What the GPL covers, and only what it covers, is copying,
> distributing, modifying, and distributing those modifications.  The
> GPL works by virtue of copyright law: without a license, you have no
> right to copy, modify, or distribute a modified version of any
> copyrighted material.  The GPL specifically gives you those rights if
> you adhere to the terms of the license.  I know for a fact (because
> I've asked) that Stallman does not intend the GPL to cover the use of
> a program.  He believes that if you have legally obtained a copy of a
> program, you have every right to use it for whatever legal purpose you
> have in mind.
> 
> You might be confused by "output" clause of the above, but this only
> covers very specific programs like bison, where the output of the
> program is another program, that includes by transformation or
> templatization, some part of the source code of the original program.
> In general, e.g. for programs like Emacs, that just isn't the case.
> Thus, I can use Emacs to write clean-room closed source programs to my
> heart's content.

Also, before someone tries to use gcc, libgcc, glibc, libstdc++, etc as an example of
something about the GPL, that these programs and libraries have
special exceptions included to make things like linking/compiling
software with gcc, etc, not require that program to be GPL'd.  

So please make sure you know what you are talking about before trying
to say Barry is correct or incorrect by using a special case as your
example.
--Dan