On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Guy Harris wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 11, 2004 at 02:58:58PM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> > In addition, whether or not OLE serves to sufficiently distance Ethereal
> > from the ClearSight product depends on the implementation technique. If it
> > uses any form of dynamic linking, then I think they still have a problem
> > with theirs being a derived work. However, I am not familiar enough with
> > OLE to be able to say.
>
> The impression I have is that an OLE server (Ethereal is presumably
> acting as an OLE server) can either be "in-process", in which case it's
> a DLL and requests from the client to the server are done by loading the
> DLL if it's not already loaded and calling code in the DLL, or
> "out-of-process", in which case it's a separate executable and some
> interprocess message channel is used to convey the request and the
> results.
This is interesting.
> If it's in-process, that's a form of dynamic linking; I'd say only
> software with a GPL-compatible license could use a GPL'ed in-process
> server.
I would tend to agree with this.
> If it's out-of-process, you could probably argue that the connection
> between the client and server doesn't require that a GPL'ed
> out-of-process server be used only by clients with GPL-compatible
> licenses.
I would tend to agree with this. If this is the case, ClearSight could
make their case that they are not a derived work stronger by making other
packet capture and analysis engines for Windows work with their product.
However, I do think there is still the issue of the time period during
which they shipped their product while it was violating the GPL :-) Had
they bothered to talk to us about these issues all of this unpleasantness
could have been avoided.
Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com