[Vtigercrm-developers] vtiger crm licence and debian package

[Mike Fedyk]

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