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From: | Chad Whitacre |
Subject: | Re: how much is too much? |
Date: | Wed, 25 May 2005 13:26:39 -0400 |
User-agent: | Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (Windows/20040913) |
The bottom line seems to be that the street between copyleft and non-copyleft free software only runs one way: copyleft can incorporate non-copyleft and retain its identity, but not the other way around. I.e., the GPL's hegemony extends to non-copyleft free software as much as to proprietary software. Accurate?
Actually I suppose we would say that there is no street between copyleft and proprietary, so the relationship is not entirely parallel. Ok, how about a little ascii art. :-)
copyleft <---- non-copyleft ----> proprietary | ^ | ^ | | | | `--' `--' - copyleft can incorporate copyleft and non-copyleft software - non-copyleft can incorporate non-copyleft software - proprietary can incorporate non-copyleft softwareSo copyleft gets two-thirds of the pie, while the others only get one-third, so to speak. And of course, this refers to incorporation of code rather than external usage via pipes, etc.
chad
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