Re: PostGIS in a commercial project

Tomas Vondra wrote on 24.10.2011 20:11:
> On 24 Říjen 2011, 19:44, Thomas Kellerer wrote:
>> Pavel Stehule wrote on 24.10.2011 12:19:
>>> there is not clean who is customer and what is one unit. If you
>>> distribute PostGIS inside your application as one unit to customer,
>>> then your application should to use GPL.
>>
>> So if we only distribute our application and require the customer to
>> install Postgres and PostGIS, then it shold be fine?
>
> I think you should actually read GPL license, because you're obviously
> confused by how it works - especially note the notion of "derived work".
>
> Derived work means that you take a GPL licensed software and modify it. In
> this case you're required to distribute the source code (again under GPL)
> to those who received the binary (legally). In case of PostGIS this would
> mean you modify the PostGIS source code itself, which is very unlikely I
> guess.

Thanks.

My understanding of "derived work" was, that anything that was "compiled" against a GPL licensed piece of software and thus will *only* run with that software is considered "derived". If derived work only applies to changes of the original software, then this is of course no problem.

Regards
Thomas