Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Dissecting a proprietary protocol - a GPL licensing issue

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

Date Index Thread Index Other Months All Mailing Lists
Date Prev Date Next Thread Prev Thread Next
From: Richard Urwin <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 00:12:56 +0000
On Thursday 06 Jan 2005 5:52 am, ronnie sahlberg wrote:
> Any dissector, either developed as a normal dissector  or as  a
> plugin will automatically be GPL. It can not be anything else.

No it will not. Only the author can assign the licence, and they are 
free to assign any licence they like. If they do not assign a GPL 
compatible licence and then distribute the dissector  then they may be 
sued by the ethereal developers. However nothing makes code GPL except 
the explicit actions of its author. They may be required to do so by a 
subsequent legal settlement, but it is still their explicit action.

> Note that GPL only relates to DISTRIBUTION, not internal use.

I considered this carefully myself recently, and ended up by putting a 
big DO-NOT-DISTRIBUTE notice up on the console at start-up.

-- 
Richard Urwin