AFAICT your company's Project Open work is well within
the bounds of the GPL
Wildpackets are working "well withing the bounds of the GPL", and got this quite negative press... So it's really just prevention here.
The situation with P/O is actually a bit trickier, because of the term "derived work" in the GPL and its interpretation by different parties. For example the distribution of proprietary P/O code together with GPLed code in the Windows installer is a slightly grey area where some people might argue that it extablishes a "derived work". So this is why the installer has to differentiate between the different installation options to make clear that it is just a "collection" (similar to a RedHat Linux CD Distribution) and not a single piece of work. Here is the reference to the detailed study:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=278014
you seem to be worrying so much about GPL issues
We are talking with investors and in this context there is hardly anything more critical then the question of whether the code is ours or not and whether we can prevent others from redistributing our code if necessary...
Also, I've been doing some consulting work for two other "OpenACS companies" (I don't know if they want to be named) and they are facing very similar questions related to the distribution of products based on OpenACS.
Really, the only question is how well or poorly your work
will integrate with and be leveraged by other users of
OpenACS and vice versa; nothing much to do with license
issues, GPL or otherwise.
Well, good point, I hope we are showing true community spirit in this sense...
Bests,
Frank
