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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Connolly who wrote (9719)	5/26/2001 2:48:49 PM
From: Allen Benn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Thanks again for the reference. The paragraph below makes everything perfectly clear, doesn’t it? The meat of the GPL can be found in sections 0 through 3. Section 0 defines the notion of a derivative work: any program containing or based on parts of the original program, including translations to different languages and linking to proprietary object files and libraries. A common source for confusion is program output. Programs such as flex and bison (and gcc) produce human readable source code. If you read Section 0 closely, it is apparent that these outputs are considered derivative works (translations) of the inputs, should the inputs be GPL'ed, and not derivative works of the program that generates them. So to clarify, the outputs of GPL'ed programs are only GPL'ed if the inputs are GPL'ed. Likewise by Section 0, even using a non-GPL'ed translator or compiler program on GPL'ed code produces output code (considered a translation) that is still GPL'ed. The first part of the paragraph seems to anticipate and render unworkable Bill’s hook trick that connects to a proprietary library. The remaining part defies simple understanding: The example of flex is easy enough to appreciate, but one has the uneasy feeling that there might be unintended consequences in complicated real-life situations. Since Linux is GPL’d, the options available for releasing a Linux library under LGPL versus GPL, given that derivative work retain the GPL license, confuse me. I think I could figure it out if I studied it carefully in much more detail, but I am not sure. The recent posts by a number of savvy technical people (an ex-IBMer, Kahn and his technical friend, Microsoft, IBM and Lineo, Wind River’s Marla Stark, and numerous references provided by James and Bill) and me ending up totally confused (but not about Stallman’s socialistic intentions as being at variance with the framer’s unheralded affinity for IP <ggg>), seems to confirm that GPL is a potential IP trap. To me all this adds up to why prudent companies with valuable IP should avoid any entanglement with GPL. I promise I am done with this issue. Allen