Still no new license -- but draft text available

[Alex Martelli]

"Grant Griffin" <g2 at seebelow.org> wrote in message
news:8nepev$115q at drn.newsguy.com...
    [snip]
> You can see then, that in this case, the GPL caused nothing but waste.

A co-cause of the waste, which many would point out, was to be found
with your corporate lawyers, though.

> in-an-ideal-world,-copyleft-wouldn't-be-needed;-in-a-non-ideal
>    -world,-it-doesn't-change-anything-ly y'rs,

It might sometimes make it costly enough to keep source closed
(by forcing cleanroom reimplementation of lots of complex stuff
as the only way to keep it closed) to convince the gold owners
that opening up the source is a better investment.  It might not,
but that's up to the gold owners at least as much as to the GPLers;
surely there is SOME amount of free-value-capturable-by-
opening-source (or of cost-to-duplicate-it-if-source-is-to-be-
kept-closed) above which the gold owners will capitulate.

Particularly since, in a componentized world, I'm pretty confident
that GPL can only infect up to boundary-components, and not
beyond them.  After all, all sorts of other components will make
calls on the GPL'd component interfaces, including lots of
pre-existing system-distributed components; calling on such
interfaces therefore cannot conceivably make other components
'derived works' of the GPL'd component.  Nor can being distributed
(antologically) together with GPL'd source change the 'derived
work' status of otherwise-non-derived components.

Therefore, an application can perfectly well be composed of
some components that are GPL'd, and other components that
are not, just as long as care is taken that the latter cannot be
ever constructed as 'derived works' of the former -- easy, it
would seem to me, for any lawyer worth his or her salt to
ensure and enforce.

Another incentive to properly componentize software...?-)


Alex