RE: License Stuff (for providers)

[Brian Bruns <camber ais org>]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, [iso-8859-1] Reinhard Müller wrote:

> > The corba objects since they are in their own processes are not considered
> > linked to the program useing them. They can be whatever license you want
> > and not have to worry what licensed process is controlling them. Kinda in
> > the same way you dont have to worry what license your webserver is and
> > what license your webbrowser is.
> 
> Not sure if you understood correctly. The providers don't communicate with
> the database directly, the are _linked_ to the database library.
> My question was whether the _providers_ can be GPL, not the clients.
> 
> Reinhard
> 

My understanding of it is this is like writing a GPL Motif application
back in Motif's non-free days.  Simply by the author writing code targeted
to that non-free library it is an implicit exception to the GPL.  

Now this does not mean that Author B can take Author A's code which was
originally linked against non-free Library X and then link it to non-free
Library Y. That would need Author A's permission.  This was the crux of
the license conflict for KDE, other peoples GPL code was link against the
then non-free Qt libraries.  However, KDE code written from scratch has
the implicit exception.

Of course for the sybase provider you can use FreeTDS and not worry ;-)

Brian