Open Source Licensing ( was RE: MySQL and open source)

[Lynn Fredricks]

> It seemed to me that, although worded with a light-hearted 
> reductio ad absurdum, Ruslan's post raised a valid question:
> 
> When using GPL code, what is an acceptable time limit for 
> making your source available?

Changing the topic - I think this is relevant outside of our other
discussion.

This is something Ive often thought about. A number of sites Ive worked with
use Joomla. There was a big snit in the Joomla community several years ago
when the Joomla organization claimed that almost any sort of plugin or
modification would be subject to their GPL license.

Some vendors of Joomla add-ons do not make their add-ons freely available at
all from their own websites. In fact, they often wrap them up in some pretty
useful (but concealing) installers. You see, they can claim it is open
source because, if someone buys it, the source code is exposed, and that
someone could easily just expose that code somewhere, out there. Consider
these questions...

>> Ive made my code available to my customers who CAN expose the code
themselves

>> Ive wrapped my code in a crafty package that makes it very hard to
examine it without it being installed

>> Some "pirate" sites make the product freely downloadable

>> I may upload a copy of source code at some point...6 months or a year
after. To a torrent site. It could be available or not, but I could reason
that its available because I made it available at some point.

It sort of makes me think of a reverse DMCA, which allows copyright holders
to demand takedown of their IP from sites. Having made some code available,
albeit in an unpleasant, hard to find, hard to extract method, is that in
compliance with the GPL 2?

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
President
Paradigma Software
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

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