How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs

If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest
possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it
free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.

To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest
to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively
convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least
the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.


Copyright (C)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.

I too am concerned about some of the rules for 'exclusion' and how these modules are going to be dealt with, however Bender has set up a separate thread for discussing this here.

Quote:

everything made for a product with a GPL licence IS ALSO in GPL licence

Is that really the case? I didn't know that.

If so, I agree that the inclusion of a licence file is not really neccessary. It would however mean that anyone could re-release commercial XOOPS modules as free ones, so I'm not so sure that inclusion of another licence might overide the GPL.

Quote:

Peekay wrote:
I too am concerned about some of the rules for 'exclusion' and how these modules are going to be dealt with, however Bender has set up a separate thread for discussing this here.

I too was a bit shocked at first, untill I saw how easy it was to fix these issues just by including one or two simple files. If that is all, I don't see what the fuss is all about.

Quote:

Quote:

everything made for a product with a GPL licence IS ALSO in GPL licence

Is that really the case? I didn't know that.

If so, I agree that the inclusion of a licence file is not really necessary. It would however mean that anyone could re-release commercial XOOPS modules as free ones, so I'm not so sure that inclusion of another licence might override the GPL.

The GPL states that anything that should be considered part of the whole application (read: cannot work stand-alone) should be considered a derivative work extending the application. Derivative works are also subject to the terms stated in the GPL, so yes, it should also be licensed as GPLed software.
There is some debate on how this should apply to interpreted languages such as PHP. I've asked *the* legal experts on the planet about this, and their answer was simple: get a lawyer and test it so there is jurisprudence regarding this. I don't see the point in doing that tho...
But by principle, the GPL is applicable to any and all extensions of a GPLed core. Does this mean there is no room whatsoever for commercial modules? No.
The GPL license text should be distributed with every module that hasn't been explicitly released under a different (commercial) license. Explicitly commercial modules should state that their code does not fall under the XOOPS GPL license, and that should take care of every legal aspect.

The 'distribution' clauses in the GPL state that all distributed code have the same license terms, but this applies to compiled languages where the source isn't implicitly available to all users. For PHP code, there isn't the same kind of distribution, each separate file could be considered its own distribution, providing the opportunity to put several files under different license terms. This is where the grey legal area starts...

However, if someone does release the commercially licensed code, claiming it to be GPL, I can't say what a judge would say about that. There is no legal standpoint in this, so it will have to be taken to court for sure.

Now, please don't start releasing commercially licensed code without permission from the authors. IMHO there is enough room for both types of modules to co-exist.

Herko

p.s. I've done extensive research into this, and talked with several leading Dutch IT law experts and posted this question on the license discuss mailinglist at the open source project, so it isn't just my personal interpretation...

WRT license file - I believe that anything released under the GPL license is supposed to include the license file - it is part of the license agreement.