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Hardware Working Group
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The GPL when using Node FFI #12

Closed reconbot closed 8 years ago

reconbot commented 9 years ago

Placeholder for research. Currently it looks like you can't use non operating system GPL'd functions without distributing yourself under the GPL.

nebrius commented 9 years ago

Thanks for opening this. Something else I had a thought on: I wonder if "distribution" has an effect. I seem to recall that whether or not you redistribute the code can play a role.

So what I'm thinking is: let's say that we aren't distributing any GPL code, even though we are dynamically calling it. Perhaps we could install these third party libraries by downloading them on the fly during installation, or perhaps wrap them up in an NPM package that's listed as a dependency (and thus also not distributed).

Can you find out if that changes the legality?

mikeal commented 9 years ago

GPLv2's language is specific to "distributing." Using is not distributing.

AGPL has language to specifically including using and not distributing.

I'm not sure about the GPLv3.

reconbot commented 8 years ago

I'm closing this as I think we're ok here.