[poppler] GPL & code commits (was Alternate Patch for CharCodeToUnicode.cc)

[Leonard Rosenthol]

[apology in advance for GPL discussion]

At 06:26 PM 1/20/2006, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
>Well, my code is mine, i am not going to let him relicense my code 
>to sell it.

         But you can't prevent that by committing your code to a GPL 
application.

         As I understand the GPL, there is nothing that prevents the 
commercialization of GPL-based projects...HOWEVER, any vendor that 
does so much make the GPL'd code available.   Two examples of this 
are Red Hat Linux and Ghostscript.  Also, in the second case, all 
commercial licenses of GS under GPL must provide the code on disk (or 
via link).

         So using the first example, since Poppler is/will be 
shipping as part of Red Hat - are you suggesting that the Red Hat 
folks are not allowed to include your code with their distribution?

         And what is to prevent me from writing a Poppler-based 
application and selling it - provided that I put the sources on the 
disk and/or provide a link?  That is perfectly legal, as I understand 
the GPL.  Even though you don't want someone else to make $$, you 
can't prevent them.


>I'm not going  to let him do business at the cost of the sleep time 
>i loose working on
>poppler.

         But it's OK for you to "do business" with Poppler (and your 
derived application) based on all the sleep that Derek has put in to 
get you to this point?!?!?!


         As Brad said - the more patches that get backed into the 
main Xpdf source base, the easier that makes merging for Poppler in 
the future.  It also means that Derek can spend him time on features 
that this group is not (eg. improved transparency support!) instead 
of reinventing the wheel.   And everybody wins - which seems like the 
best reason for OSS in the first place!


Leonard
who is a maintainer for a couple of OSS applications and participates 
on many others.

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Leonard Rosenthol                            <mailto:leonardr at pdfsages.com>
Chief Technical Officer                      <http://www.pdfsages.com>
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