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"I've found three ways to combine any proprietary work with GPL and other Free Software, without a need to give away any source code, even when the Free part is under the new and most rigorous GPL3 license."

What on Earth is he talking about? I this was true, wouldn't it be completely subverting all the copyleft licenses? This is dropped completely as a side-thought, but isn't it rather disquieting and completely against everything else he stands for in this article? Have I misunderstood something?




I don't know what these "three ways" are, but the GPL in general will not cross a process boundary. As long as you talk to it cross-process, you're safe from the point of view of combining code. You're even "safer" if you're talking across servers. (Scare quoted because you're basically 100% safe either way.) Other clauses may need to be respected as well but they tend not to be onerous.

Obviously, with sufficient effort, you can do anything across a process boundary, it's just inconvenient, and you have to at least share all the changes you made on the GPL side.


I think he was talking about http://technocrat.net/d/2008/6/11/43198 where the three ways are:

Separate CPU, Kernel under a kernel, and User Mode

More applicable to appliances and embedded software, than application software in general.




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