[Vtigercrm-developers] vtiger crm licence and debian package

Brett Hooker brett.hooker at saucesoft.com
Wed Feb 1 04:47:43 PST 2006


Don't know if this will help the analysis, but you might like to engage 
Brendan Scott of  Open Source Law in analyzing this for you.

See:
http://www.opensourcelaw.biz

Might be worth getting a pro-OSS lawyer in the loop on this.


Mike Fedyk wrote:

>Finjon Kiang wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On 2/1/06, Fathi Boudra <fboudra at free.fr> wrote:
>> 
>>
>>    
>>
>>>taken partly from Copyright.txt. It seems (for me) a bit incomprehensible.
>>>Some informations are false (feel free to correct me), which part of apache or
>>>mysql are in vtiger crm ? I'm not a lawyer but lawyer point of view is
>>>needed. Some clarity is requested on this subject, especially when you're
>>>looking vtiger crm story.
>>>
>>>cheers,
>>>
>>>Fathi
>>>   
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>I got the same feeling with you. I'm not a lawyer, too. But I think
>>vtiger crm must be released under GPL. 
>>
>>    
>>
>This is a real gray area with the GPL and interpreted languages.  The 
>GPL talks about making the source source available for a binary 
>distribution and it talks about compiling and linking.  Where does the 
>compilation take place?  At each location.  The PHP bytecode is not 
>being distributed.   Even the binary vtiger dist includes the .php 
>source files.
>
>  
>
>>MPL allows you to modify the
>>license as you wish, 
>>
>>    
>>
>No. The MPL defines the distinction between license boundaries at the 
>file level.  If you want to introduce another license into a MPL 
>licensed project it needs to be in a separate file.
>
>  
>
>>LGPL allows you to use the software which
>>released under LGPL as a library and choose another license you like.
>>But under GPL, once your software includes any GPL product, you should
>>release your software under GPL.
>>
>>    
>>
>That is not a black and white requirement of the GPL.  There are many 
>ways GPL code can be brought into a non-GPL project if the interactions 
>with the GPL code are done in certain ways.
>
>I am not claiming that his has been done with vtiger though.  I'm not 
>familiar with the code base enough yet.
>
>Mike
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>  
>




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