Re: [Swftools-common] question about the license for swf2jpeg

[Gnomad]

One of the reasons why so many people have difficulties understanding
the GPL is the multiple definitions of the word "free."   More
correctly, it is the difference between "free" and "freedom."  When
you release only a binary program, even if you do not charge for it,
no one else has the *freedom* to alter it for their own use.  The goal
of the GPL is *not* to restrict the ability of software developers to
charge for their work, but rather to insure that source code to all
derivative works is made available to others.

If you wish to follow the *spirit* of the GPL, you will release the
source code to your application which uses swftools, or any other GPL
licensed codebase.  This has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on
whether or not you derive income from the code which you have written!
 In fact, you are *encouraged* to derive income from an application
compiled the source code that you release.

However, I will re-iterate that following the *letter* of the GPL, if
you invoke whatever.EXE (where whatever.EXE is built from unmodified
GPL code) via fork/exec (which is to say system(), etc.) you are not
bound by the GPL.

>From a legal standpoint, your position is quite clear, as you state
that you want to include the exact same binary that is a portion of
the swftools binary distribution.

>From an ethical standpoint, you should either release the source code
to your application, and/or donate a portion of revenue to the
swftools team.  Legally, you are not bound to either based on your
description of usage.

-g.




On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Alec Bennett <address@hidden> wrote:

> My understanding, which of course could be way off base, is that the GPL is
> there to protect code from being incorporated into closed source systems, as
> opposed to simply using a GPL covered program as a component, which would
> still have easily viewable sourcecode (and the GPL license). For example
> there are countless commercial projects that package ffmpeg.exe with their
> projects. They don't take code from ffmpeg, they simply include the
> executable along with the GPL and easy instructions for seeing the
> sourcecode. To me this means the spirit of the GPL is preserved, which is
> that derivative works are still GPL'd.
>
> As I say, I certainly might be off base here.
>
> And I'm probably opening a big smelly can of worms here, but could someone
> explain this line of the GPL to me?
>
> "To release a non-free program is always ethically tainted". How on earth is
> being paid for your work "ethically tainted"? I understand that releasing a
> non free program that someone else wrote is certainly tainted, but if you
> wrote it yourself and are offering it for a couple of bucks to support
> further development, in what possible way is that *ethically* tainted?
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAndNF