Re: licencing and modules

I think the only option to prevent this would be for Duane to modify the
license, or place an addendum to the license (Duane is still the
copyright holder, correct?). I suspect it would only require a one or
two line addendum. Does the newest version of the GPL address this? I
seem to recall it had evolved a bit in this direction recently.

Technically, any type of module loading you added that required some
form of open-ness in the module could easily be overridden by the module
programmer (by releasing a custom version of Squid). So programming
solutions are not really feasible.

This is definitely a concern that should be taken seriously, as the
number of closed source drivers for the Linux kernel can attest. In
this case, the problem is much larger, in that a company could add a
number of proprietary modules to Squid--thus leveraging the quite large
and impressive codebase of Squid without giving back to the project.

Then again...Is this a problem in other GPL projects? I would guess
there are other modular projects out there, other than the kernel. What
do they do about this issue?

Of course...if the module has to link in a number of other Squid parts,
like libs, to connect to the rest of Squid...which I would guess it
would...this might moot, as the libs are all GPL'ed and not LGPL'ed.

Quite a stumper.

Robert Collins wrote:

> I think now is a good time to raise this topic.
>
> One of the concerns I have with getting run-time modules going, is that
> corporations may release binary only modules. Thats something I don't
> want to see happen. I'm driving the run-time loading to allow easy
> inplace upgrades, and more flexible configs, not to reduce the GPLness
> of squid.
>
> Is there any mechanism that can be put in place to ensure that all
> libraries/modules that squid can load will have to be GPL'd as well?
>
> Or is doing that a bad thing?
>
> Rob

                                   --
                      Joe Cooper <joe@swelltech.com>
                  Affordable Web Caching Proxy Appliances
                         http://www.swelltech.com
Received on Thu Apr 19 2001 - 22:05:13 MDT