New param "source environment"?

[Jeremy Allison]

Tim Potter wrote:
> 
> Check out gnu.misc.discuss for your daily dose of GPL interpretation
> fun.  There was a recent thread on "condomization" to avoid infecting
> other programs with the GPL by putting a network or ipc server, or
> other wrapper between the GPL library and another piece of code.

Yeah - I've been following that. It's amazing how much
some people hate the GPL :-).

> If there was a command line version of the trendmicro virus software,
> it should be possible to implement a on-access scanner by intercepting
> each open() and close() command using samba-fu and running the command
> line virus checker over each file.

Yeah - but that would be tacky (and should be unneccesary IMHO).

> > We would have to give a special dispensation for vfs libraries
> > in order for this to work.
> 
> That's certainly possible.  There are numerous exceptions to the
> strict interpretation of the GPL for various pieces of software -
> bison, guile, linux kernel modules.

I agree. I'm also very inclined to argue in favour of adding
this dispensation to the Samba licensing as I think having
the virus checker vfs layer would be a good thing, even
as closed source. I also think it would be good to allow
Oracle, Informix, Sybase, DB/2 and PostgresSQL to add database
vfs layers to allow Samba to store stuff directly into a relational
database (maybe an ODBC layer on Linux ? :-).

I just wanted to make sure Luke (and other readers) knew that
a dispensation would be needed in order for this to be
legal - I wasn't arguing against doing it :-).

Cheers,

	Jeremy.

-- 
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Buying an operating system without source is like buying
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