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Derivative Works And Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the deriving-force dept.

marvin826 writes " Larry Rosen has a nice article in the current issue of the Linux Journal about the legal interpretation of derivative works. Seems there are two camps in the world in terms of using open-source libraries, such as GPL licensed libraries, in proprietary software. Read this article and see which camp you are in! Having people working full-time on proprietary software, using open-source libraries, can only help the open-source software get better? "

3 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This article is not legal advice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    It does not matter how it is "assumed" that the GPL works.

    It matters how the law thinks it works.

    By making your libraries GPL, you are making sure no one will use them for truly useful purposes.

    Even the nutjobs at the FSF don't make glibc GPL. They know better. They talk about how bad the LGPL is, but they continue to use it.

    Besides Linux, no major useful software for developers is GPL only. Apache, X, GTK+, Qt (dual licensed).

  2. Twirlip, you're on... by ?erosion · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    This is what you'd consider a target rich environment. These people need to know why they're all wrong. Come on, teach us some stuff!

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  3. What goes around, comes around by ShatteredDream · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Let's face it, a lot of proprietary technology is damn good. BeOS still in many ways (as an OS only) rocks Linux's world as a desktop. And that's really funny because there's been no official updates in 2 years and it was a closed source product. ICC whips GCC in x86 peformance. .NET and Java are proprietary. And don't give me that shit about programming in PERL or C beating both hands down in anything other than maintainence and system-building respectively.

    If you lock out closed source vendors (surprise, surprise, they're not all evil!) they'll lock you out. They won't promote Mozilla, OpenOffice, Apache, etc. Does it occur to you rabid numbskulls that they might actually put some of their guys to work helping the library builders fix bugs, port them to new platforms and stuff like that? I bet you'd object to Apple writing a native GLIB/GTK clone for OSX and releasing it under the BSD license so anyone can use it.

    GPL advocates seem to be more and more like "punks." A bunch of elitist fucks who are just a low-budget version of what they hate.

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