[sword-devel] Sword license

[Jimmie Houchin]

Joe Walker wrote:
> My understanding is that all the GPL obliges you to do is release the 
> code under GPL. It does not stop you releasing it under the GPL AND 
> another MIT/BSD style license (so long as there is no ad. clause conflict)
> Many projects like Mozilla and MySQL (IIRC) are released under 2 licences.

I think Chris was primarily referring to code that Sword uses that is 
GPL and they don't have copyright to and therefore can't dual license as 
long as the use that code.

> So if there are questions of copyright polution as a result of reading 
> JSword code, you may well be able to dual license. However IANAL of course.
> 
> I don't understand how there can be a problem for GPL code to link *TO* 
> non-GPL code. The GPL uses the word "derived" and not "linked" and the 
> standard copyright definition of "derived works" is a very one way process.
> So I don't understand people that claim you can't have a GPL Java 
> program because it has to link to non-GPL code. It sounds like Squeak 
> might be the same.

The difference between Squeak/Smalltalk and Java or any other textfile 
based languages is that all source code in Squeak/Smalltalk is in a 
single file called an image. The image is monolithic. An image is like a 
hard disk version of the object memory (ram) of the Squeak application. 
It is like persistant memory. Because of this all inside is considered 
linked by many such as RMS.

> However this might be getting a bit off topic.
> 
> Joe.
[snip]

Jimmie Houchin