.doc viewer/reader

[Pat McCann]

"Alex Martelli" <alex at magenta.com> writes:

> "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at lemburg.com> wrote:
...
> > And there are more... the problem with the above two is that they
> > are GPLed and any application linking against them would have
> > to be GPLed too.
> 
> Yes.  A non-GPL'd application wanting to read Word files would have
> to package up the word-document-reading functionality into a separate
> GPL'd component and talk to it via Corba/ILU/SOAP/COM/whatever --
> RMS is on record as saying that such "arm's length" communication
> does not spread the GPL to other components chatting with the GPL'd
> one, but I think that's pretty clear anyway.

This Corba-related post, purporting to be from Stallman,
http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=berlin-design&m=93118897023514&w=2
has an interesting twist on that.  Whether the GPL is required to be
spread or not, using the GPL will infect other components anyway because
many developers are ignorant and easily fooled.  And words to live by:
"So the real question is, what result do you want?"