Tom deL wrote:
A product has piqued my interest and claims to be GPL but the disclaimers
and general tone of their license "explanation" gives me pause.
Any opinions of how truly "open source" this project is would be greatly
appreciated:
http://easyco.com/initiative/openqm/opensource/faq.htm
Others have mentioned this project on debian-legal as well, with similar
concerns. See the thread "Is this software really GPL?" back in
October, starting at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/10/msg00331.html
In particular, passages that seem (to me at least) to want to make programs
written for QM fall into the realm of derivative works. Seems a bit as if
gnu would want anything compiled with gcc (or written in a flavour of
C that is intended for gcc) to become a derivative work.
Am I reading this the wrong way?
While their explanatory material is slightly biased towards making you
believe you need one of their Commercial QM [sic; should be Proprietary]
licenses, I think they have the correct interpretation of derivative
works. Just as a program written against a GPLed library is (generally)
a derivative work of that library, a program written against OpenQM is
(generally) a derivative work of OpenQM, and as such, is subject to the
terms of the GPL on OpenQM. Furthermore, they acknowledge that they
implement a superset of a particular standard, which has multiple
implementations, so if your program requires *only* the standard and
nothing specific to their program, it is not subject to the GPL.
Finally, they explicitly state that nothing in their explanation
provides any further restrictions beyond those of the GPL; see the "How
do you resolve any conflicts between what you say and what the GPL says"
section.