LinuxPLC/GPL
Jan 8, 2000 9:42 am, by Ken Crater
Subject : LinuxPLC Project
from the Automation List dept.
Text :
>A question for Ken Crater. Would your company consider making its controller available under LinuxPLC, perhaps as a commercial add-on?< We're moving toward a modular architecture that would permit this, and certainly we'd be overjoyed to extend capabilities for our customers in this direction. No commitments as to timing, though, since we have a few other things on our plate right now . I think that the licensing track bears on this question, too, though. We wouldn't need the ability to modify or extend LinuxPLC code in any "product" of Control Technology Corp. in any proprietary manner, however we might need to provide some proprietary libraries to link against or drivers to call. A form of GPL that basically says "the author gets to control any commercial exploitation of his/her work" is fine, since any GPL code would be distributed in source form with license intact. A form that is more virus-like, e.g., "everything the GPL code touches becomes GPL", would likely not work in this case. I suspect there are many other such cases, too, which is why I have our IP attorney looking into the question. Whatever license is selected for the project, we should make a best-efforts attempt to discover what it really means, not what the best legal minds in software engineering think it means . Ken Crater, President Control Technology Corp. ken@control.com _______________________________________________ LinuxPLC mailing list LinuxPLC@linuxplc.org http://linuxplc.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxplc
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