[ic] Need clarification on license/GPL

Mike Heins mikeh@minivend.com
Sat, 5 May 2001 10:52:05 -0400


Quoting interch (interch@web3.valley-internet.com):
> 
> 
> I am a little unclear on a few things when it comes to Interchange and the
> GPL license, any feedback would be appreciated.
> 
> I am evaluating Interchange as a platform for our company to use for
> providing ecommerce applications and where the line is drawn as to when
> our applications being built with interchange would fall under the GPL are
> a little unclear to me.  In other words, I am assuming that any html
> templates or files that are called via say Route, that execute a series of
> Interchange tags, would not in themselves automatically be GPL.  But at
> what point would our code snippets fall under the GPL?  What about User
> defined tags, or a user defined tag that then overrides an existing
> Interchange subroutine?
> 
> Our strategy would include intentionally adding to the source code and of
> course making that available, but part of what we wold want to do is
> create custom templates using stock Interchange tags and features that we
> would want to sell for profit, much like Red Hat I assume will be doing.
> 

As long as you recognize I am not the ultimate authority anymore, here are
my thoughts.

If you don't hack the distributed software and redistribute it, you
can do basically anything you want. Using the GlobalSub, UserTag, and
other features to override core routines is just fine, and is even the
recommended method in the documentation.

If you clip code out of the software and use that as the basis of your
routines, they should then be GPLed.

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