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Re: Are projects, which I manage whis tortoise / subversion automaticly under GPL Lizenz?

From: Nix <nix_at_esperi.org.uk>
Date: 2005-09-19 12:45:26 CEST

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Paul Koning prattled cheerily:
>>>>>> "Romain" == Romain Prévost <prevost.romain@gmail.com> writes:
> Romain> Generally speaking, I don't even know a license which
> Romain> restricts you from using the datas you generate with any
> Romain> application the way you want, as long as those datas are
> Romain> truly yours.
>
> Generally speaking, yes, but look at Bison for an exception.

More specifically, anything which is intended to be used to textually
include stuff licensed under several licenses into its output must make
special provisions in the license of that stuff to cater for that.

Compilers for many languages have to do this in the licenses for their
runtime libraries. GCC, for instance, has separate exceptions to the GPL
for libgcc (which is linked into all programs compiled with GCC),
libstdc++ header files (which are textually included into programs), and
the GNU Ada runtime library (which is automatically included into
programs by cross-unit inlining).

In all cases, the exceptions say something similar to this:

,----
| In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License, the
| Free Software Foundation gives you unlimited permission to link the
| compiled version of this file into combinations with other programs,
| and to distribute those combinations without any restriction coming
| from the use of this file. (The General Public License restrictions
| do apply in other respects; for example, they cover modification of
| the file, and distribution when not linked into a combine
| executable.)
`----

(Microsoft uses the license for its runtime libraries to clamp down
barriers to competition. I doubt anyone will be too surprised.)

Older versions of Bison took the interesting approach --- or unpleasant
approach, depending on your viewpoint --- of splitting the files it
included into two pieces, one of which was usable in any projects
without restriction, and the other of which (implementing the
superset-of-POSIX stuff that Bison could do) was GPLed --- the idea
being that if you wanted to use the nifty extra features, you had to
license the work that used that parser under the GPL.

(RMS stopped using this trick in Bison 1.24, released in 1995, when it
became clear that it wasn't doing anything other than annoying people.)

However, this is all quite off-topic, as none of it applies to
Subversion, which doesn't textually include things shipped with
Subversion into its output (it'd be a rather unusual VCS that did that).

So the license of your works is totally unaffected by the version
control system you store them in.

-- 
`One cannot, after all, be expected to read every single word
 of a book whose author one wishes to insult.' --- Richard Dawkins
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Received on Mon Sep 19 12:47:28 2005

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