[ic] Need clarification on license/GPL

[interch]

I am a little unclear on a few things when it comes to Interchange and the
GPL license, any feedback would be appreciated.

I am evaluating Interchange as a platform for our company to use for
providing ecommerce applications and where the line is drawn as to when
our applications being built with interchange would fall under the GPL are
a little unclear to me.  In other words, I am assuming that any html
templates or files that are called via say Route, that execute a series of
Interchange tags, would not in themselves automatically be GPL.  But at
what point would our code snippets fall under the GPL?  What about User
defined tags, or a user defined tag that then overrides an existing
Interchange subroutine?

Our strategy would include intentionally adding to the source code and of
course making that available, but part of what we wold want to do is
create custom templates using stock Interchange tags and features that we
would want to sell for profit, much like Red Hat I assume will be doing.

I am glad to see that Red Hat picked up Akopia and Interchange.  For a lot
of business reasons companies like ours that are public and liked
Interchange couldn't really use it anywhere in our product lines or
application development because using any GPL software that wasn't backed
by a larger company would hurt valuation.  I'm curious to see how many
companies start using Interchange now.  If Red Hat puts the resources
behind it I think it could really take off.  There is a huge gap in the
market between solutions like Miva and Intershop that I think Interchange
could fill nicely.


Chris Ochs

Product Manager
Payment Online Inc  
http://www.paymentonline.com