Re: [OT] OSS by William "Chops" Westfield .

On Dec 20, 2005, at 8:31 AM, Gerhard Fiedler wrote: > I don't see anything more "viral" in this license than > in most commercial source code licenses. It's "viral" in that a small amount of GPL code can "infect" a large amount of proprietary software. I've worked with quite a bit of licensed proprietary code; none of it makes ANY claim on my code that gets "statically linked" with the licensed code (beyond that it print a copyright notice for the licensed SW as well.) I find it somewhere between surprising and sinister that any compiler would claim to change the license nature of source code just because that code was linked with standardized library code that supports the language. Vendors were widely harassed for wanting to charge royalties for runtime environments for more complex languages; the GPL is worse than that. Apparently the avr gcc libraries have a "special" license to avoid this. Good for them. I wonder which gcc libraries DON'T have such a modified license... (and I don't think I should HAVE to wonder!) BillW