[JDEV] Question about licensing

[Scott Robinson]

Interleaved response.

Scott.

* Benjamin Holzman translated into ASCII [Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 02:52:55PM -0400][<37FB9A87.2B431D35 at orientation.com>]
> It appears from this statement in the FAQ:
> 
> 5.2 What License is Jabber covered under? 
> 
> The Jabber project consists of various different teams producing code
> for different aspects. Each team has chosen the appropriate license for
> the code they are producing. The core of the project, including the
> library efforts, servers, modules, protocol, and transports, is all

The _protocol_ is not under GPL.

> being developed and released under the GPL. You can find a copy of the
> GPL at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. 
> 
> that if I pay for a client application to be built to the specification
> in the documentation, all of the code in that client would need to be
> released under GPL as well.  Is this actually true?  Also, would it be
> mitigated if the code in the client which actually talks the jabber
> protocol exists as a separate library, distributed under GPL?
> 

In short, if you write something that speaks the Jabber protocol it does not
have to be GPL. If you write a program using derivitive code that is GPL'ed,
your code must be GPL'ed. However, you can write a program that uses a
GPL'ed library without the program needing to be under the GPL.

> Ben
> -- 
> |        Ben Holzman                       bah at orientation.com       |
> |      orientation.com                     Tel: +1 212 966 5553 x219 |
> |  Senior Software Engineer                Fax: +1 212 966 5554      | 
> $ perl -l040e 'print ucfirst for reverse qw/hacker perl another just/'
> 
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