[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[Ben Greear]

"Travis S. Casey" wrote:

> I could be wrong as well -- unfortunately, a lawsuit is pretty much the
> only way to find out for sure which way the license would be interpreted.
> A non-commercial mud isn't likely to have the resources to fight a
> lawsuit, so it is something to consider.

And a single developer releasing under the GPL is not likely to have the
resources, and more importantly, the desire, to screw people over highly
technical readings of the GPL...  I hope :)

> I wasn't speaking of muds specifically, but of all the code that's being
> released under the GPL.  BTW, note that not all GNU libraries are released
> under the LGPL -- some (such as the readline library) are released under
> the regular GPL.  Including those libraries does bind you to the GPL.

Thats interesting.  I know that just including the header files from the
linux kernel, for example, does not seem to bind you to the kernel's (basically)
GPL license (or binary modules wouldn't be legal).  Then again, I think
the kernel folks are more lenient that a hard core GPL adherent might be...

> And if you borrow as much as one line of code from any GPLed program, your
> program is bound by the GPL -- so someone who, say, lifts the socket code
> from a GPLed program and modifies it for their server is bound by it.

I think thats a bit extreme.  I'm sure we all have a line of code that
says something like:  int i = 0;

As for select loops, I don't know.  You can always rip out their code
and write your own loop if some (zealot) calls you on something like that.
As someone else mentioned, there are only so many ways to write a select loop...

--
Ben Greear (greear at cyberhighway.net)  http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear 
Author of ScryMUD:  scry.wanfear.com 4444        (Released under GPL)
http://scry.wanfear.com



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev