February 2008
Intermediate to advanced
285 pages
7h 6m
English
book
The Open Source Alternative: Understanding Risks and Leveraging Opportunities
by Heather J. Meeker
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 14. The Border Dispute of GPL2
Defining the Border Dispute
There is one central, crucial question of GNU General Public License version 2 (GPL2) compliance whose importance to commercial developers eclipses all others, the question that I refer to as the border dispute. The "border" at issue is that between a "work based on the Program" and everything else.
As we know, the GPL is a hereditary license whose copyleft provisions apply to the original work (the "Program") and works "based on the Program." However, what constitutes a work based on the Program, and is thus covered by GPL, versus a new work can be very difficult to determine.
Resolving this border dispute is crucial to developers of proprietary technology products. Before I explain why this is so, it is worth observing who is not concerned. Mere users of GPL materials are not concerned about this issue. The boundary dispute matters only when you are concerned about the obligation to lay open source code in distributions. The reason is because the copyleft obligations of the GPL attach only to code that is distributed,[178] not to code that is merely used.
On the other end of the spectrum, companies using a pure open source business model are not concerned either, because the hereditary nature of the GPL does not compromise their goals. They release all code in open source format because they want to, not because they must. But this is a relatively small constituency. Of all the companies today using free software in ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.