Re: GNU license + catalogs

[mikeh@minivend.com]

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Quoting Billy (chiangt@iname.com):
> 
> Hi all
> 
> 	Just some clarifications on the minivend license... anything useful
> created/modified on the existing "engine" of minivend needs to be dumped
> back out to the minivend (right?).  So would the catalogs customised,created
> for own use, would that be counted too as in the GNU license (ie legally a
> part of minivend which needs to be put back out?)  or anything built on top
> of minivend can be proprietary?, ie a GUI for administrating minivend...etc
> (Think someone's already doing this?)

If you hack the code and then redistribute it, you have to give complete
source and documentation up to current standards. Some would say that standard
is low 8-), but there is at least some documentation for over 95% of MiniVend
features. There are a few powerful undocumented features, i.e. chained shipping,
on-the-fly database indexing, and user-definable search engines.

If you simply run completely new code on top of (or by including modules
and addons like UserTags) you can do anything you want. Catalog pages
are not a part of MiniVend; any routines I have embedded in the demo
I did not copyright. You don't have to give away your catalog pages at
all; they are like compiling a program with GCC, you can use the executable
any way you want.

If you use and improve the core algorithms you *should* make those
improvements generally available; if you improve and then redistribute
you *must* make them available.

My intent is more like the Artistic License (see Perl) than the GPL;
i.e. mostly you shouldn't copy it and then claim you wrote it. (Which
has happened more than once; someone publicly claimed a patent pending
on part of MiniVend in 1997, almost two years after the first version
hit the web!)

All of this is my own opinion of how to interpret the GPL; your
mileage may vary depending on how much latent lawyer you have in your
personality.

-- 
Mike Heins                          http://www.minivend.com/  ___ 
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