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A comment on Writing Open Source Software? Make Sure You Know Your Copyright Rights. Parent comment

Re:Writing Open Source Software? Make Sure You Know Your Cop... by Nursie on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @01:04PM (#5444611)
Amusing but the description of the GPL is a bit off

"The archetypal bearded, sandal-clad free software license. Your code can never be used in any proprietary program, ever! Take that, capitalism!"

GPL absolutely can be used in closed source, it just can't be distributed as closed source (see the much rumoured, heavily customised Google-internal-linux as an example). The AGPL is more like the statement above.

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Re:Writing Open Source Software? Make Sure You Know Your Cop... by falcolas on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @01:28PM (#5444780)
Sadly, the definition of "distribution" is so vague that many lawyers won't allow you to "distribute" your code to a box you don't own outright, in an effort to reduce their liability.

I've been in a few companies where this was a problem, since we were working in part for the government, which required us to run our code in nodes which were owned by a separate contractor. The lawyers interpreted that as distribution, and we had to replace the GPL'd portions of code we were using.

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Re:Writing Open Source Software? Make Sure You Know Your Cop... by Nursie on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @01:30PM (#5444789)
That doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me, you have really distributed to someone else at that point if they own the box, so at the least the GPL kicks in for them.
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