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rmyorston / pdpmake

Public domain POSIX make
https://frippery.org/make
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Are only files in `testsuite/` GPL licensed? #20

Closed samboy closed 1 year ago

samboy commented 1 year ago

I observe this program is under two licenses, a public domain license in the top level directory, and a GPL license in the testsuite/ directory. Since none of the programs in the top-level directory link to programs in the testsuite/ directory, I presume it is only files in testsuite/ that have the GPL license.

Please clarify this.

rmyorston commented 1 year ago

Your interpretation is correct. The make program is public domain (with a licence based on the Unlicense) and the testsuite is GPL. There's no link between the two, one just happens to live in a subdirectory of the other.

Shipping a binary based on the public domain code wouldn't result in any obligation under the GPL to provide the testsuite.

At least, that's my interpretation, for what it's worth.

samboy commented 1 year ago

Thanks. Here’s my point of view, as someone with extensive professional programming experience: Ever since the SFLC lawsuits, the corporate reaction has not been for them to GPL or otherwise open source a bunch of code. The reaction has been to avoid anything with a GPL license whenever possible. I have run scanners which scan packages incorporating open source code to ensure that we were not using a single bit of GPL licensed code in our product.

Indeed, Apple has spent a lot of money getting LLVM and clang up to snuff so that they can have a compiler without needing to use GPL code, and will not distribute any GPL3 code with their products. The GPL Busybox has mostly been replaced with the non-copyleft Toybox (which has everything major except sh and awk, both of which have non-GPL open source implementations)

Point being, there are a lot of use cases where a GPL license will stop people from using a given open source project, so I prefer not to have it in any code I may distribute.

Thanks for reading my thoughts. Closing ticket.