[Openmcl-devel] swank/ccl license

[David Brown]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 05:39:15PM +0000, tfb at tfeb.org wrote:
>On 30 Jan 2018, at 12:58, Steven Nunez <[1]steven.nunez at illation.com.hk> wrote:
>
>    I can shed some light on this from a commercial perspective. LLGPL and
>    company are untested in the courts. Combined with a recent rise in the IP
>    equivalent of ambulance chasers (see the case of BusyBox as an example), no
>    commercial entity will go near anything with an encumbered license
>    (meaning, compelled in any way to release source code).
>
>I don't want to get into a fight about this but I have more devices than I can
>easily count that came with addenda to their documentation explaining how you
>could get hold of all the *GPL source they were required to let you have.  My
>*iPhone's* legal notices include the GPL and I think the LGPL (it at least
>contains the GPL and a reference to the LGPL, I got fed up reading through the
>tiny text to see if the whole text of it was there).

I just read through my iPhone's legal notice.  There isn't as mention
of GPL or LGPL anywhere there.  Apple seems pretty aggressive about
trying to eliminate any software covered under these licenses, even
replacing command line utilities on MacOS with BSD-licensed
equivalents, as well as putting resources into the LLVM project to be
able to remove gcc as a compiler on their platform.

Even the app store itself tends to reject or pull apps that contain
GPL code, as I understand mostly driven by complaints of the authors
of that code that the Apple store license prevents the requirements of
the GPL from being followed.

>So, no, this is just wrong, sorry.  It might be true for some pure software
>products.  It might also depend on how confident the company is in the lawyers
>it can buy (I imagine the answer for Apple is 'pretty confident').

Only if by "pretty confident" it means they wish to have nothing to do
with GPL code in any way shape or form.

Lots of MIT, BSD, and Apache code in there, though.

David