On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:46:12 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:22:27 -0800, Darren New wrote:
>> 
>>> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>>>   This makes GPL incompatible with all other licenses. This is
>>>>>   rather
>>>>> restricting.
>>>> But protective of the rights of the original author, which is the
>>>> underlying goal.
>>> Which original author? The one giving away the code with more
>>> restrictions, or the one giving away the code with fewer restrictions?
>> 
>> The one who wrote the code that you are modifying and then
>> distributing.
> 
> What makes you think I'm modifying the GPL code?
> 
> If I include libjpg without modifying it at all, I can no longer use the
> MIT license on my code, even if my code is orders of magnitude larger
> and more valuable. This forces me, while building something large that I
> need to get paid for, to rewrite code that's already tested and works
> well and is bug-free and safe. Hence, GPL code leads to bugs in non-GPL
> code.

You can link to GPL libraries.  There are plenty of examples of this.

What you cannot do is incorporate GPL-licensed code into non-GPL licensed 
code.

There is, AFAIK, one single exception - if you own the code, you can dual-
license it.  There are also plenty of examples of this.

There's nothing that says you can't get paid for writing GPL code.  There 
are also also plenty of examples of this.

But if you're building something large and you want to leverage code 
others have written, you have to respect their license terms (whatever 
that license is, not just if it's GPL).

Jim

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