Geek Answers Handbook

When does software become “proprietary”?

They say the company uses open source libraries or programs and packs them into its own solution. or perhaps the engineers copied a specific section of these open source libraries and compiled it now into a very useful “proprietary” software package.

What legal issues will be affected by this company, if any? are you allowed to do this? I mean, the client does not see the source code, it only runs binary files on its computer.

For example, I find a great NLP library in python and decide to use it in my program, which I sell for $ 4,000 (I write as 10 lines of code and let the library do the work). can i get in trouble? will I need to write an NLP library from scratch to be considered "proprietary"?

+5
source share
3 answers

It is completely licensed. If the code is licensed under the GPL, the GPL has the legal requirement that any code statically combined (i.e. compiled with) a GPL code must also be a GPL. Small GPL (LGPL) allows dynamic linking. Of course, GPL restrictions do not work until you distribute a product that includes binary form.

BSD, - , . BSD , , .

.

- , . , .

+11

, /. IANAL.

+3

As other answers point out, it completely depends on the source code license that you use . If you are doing anything commercially, I would consider hiring a lawyer to review any licenses you encounter. Here are some links with information on popular open source licenses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licenses
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category

+1
source

More articles:


All Articles