>>>>> "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.
Or maybe you're thinking about the murkier situations where you write
a program that links with a GPL'd (not LGPL'd) library, in essense
"using" that library to do something. Here, my understanding of the
situation has long been that under some situations, your application
may have to be compatible with the GPL. An often cited example is GNU
readline, which has a specific API that has only one implementation
(that may or may not still be true). If you write an application that
uses readline, I believe the FSF would interpret your code as being
"in effect" GPL-infected even if you let the end-user do the linking,
because there is no way your application could provide that
functionality without the linking to GPL covered code. On the other
hand, I can write an application that uses gettext() because there are
non-GPL covered implementations that can be used as an alternative
(e.g. on Solaris -- but I don't actually remember if GNU gettext is
GPL'd or LGPL'd and I don't care enough right now to look).
But maybe I misunderstand your point? Entirely possible at this late
hour. ;)
-Barry
P.S. If it matters, and if you care <wink>, my personal opinion is
that he or she (or it :) who owns the copyright gets to decide how and
under what terms the material will be distributed. That's a truism of
copyright of course, and you may not be happy about it, but dems de
breaks.
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