On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 06:57:49PM -0400, Herbert Graf wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-05-10 at 20:32 +0000, Byron Jeff wrote:
> > On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 04:58:33PM -0400, William Chops Westfield wrote:
> > >
> > > On May 10, 2008, at 11:40 AM, Mark Rages wrote:
> > > > Can you explain how the GPL does not allow you to change
> > > > the software to suit your needs?
> > >
> > > "My needs include being able to keep my modifications to the open
> > > source material proprietary when I distribute the software."
> >
> > Yup. That's a tough one. It's real difficult to balance that against the
> > fact that a large base of incoming software was freely given you, yet you
> > want to restrict the outflow of changes to others.
> 
> More often then not the person DOESN'T want to restrict the outflow, but
> they are forced to by NDAs.

I understand. But there's actually a solution to that. Simply get anyone
you release the product to to sign an NDA.

There's a misconception with the GPL/LGPL that you have to release your
code to everyone. You only have to release the code to those you distrubute
the product to. And you can have them sign an NDA so that they cannot
further release that code to anyone else because of the NDA.

End user means end user, not all users.

BAJ

> 
> Perfect example of this is many chips out there require an NDA to access
> the programming spec, and in many specific areas there are NO chips that
> don't require an NDA. As a result, ALL code that uses information from
> that spec MUST remain closed. So basically, if you want to create a
> product in a certain area, you CAN'T use GPL at all, and I find this to
> be a shame.
> 
> FWIW I've had to pass on GPL code because of these sorts of issues.
> 
> TTYL
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