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benny1967's Avatar
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#22
I still don't fully understand the license they chose (EPL). The EPL FAQ-page states that it's somehow copyleft, meaning that you have to distribute your changes to an EPL-licensed application under the EPL again and must not distribute a proprietary binary only.

On the other hand, it says it's perfactly legal to re-license EPL-licensed code under a commercial license if you don't change it.

Finally, the FAQ states it's incompatible to both the GPLv2 and the GPLv3.

GPL-incompatibility worries me. What worries me even more is that they can re-license the "open" code and distribute it as non-open binary (as long as they don't make changes), which is what I don't like about Android.
It means that although they claim Symbian is open, it's perfactly legal to distribute Symbian on handsets as closed source with a license that explicitely says: "You must not make any changes to the software on your handset, must not distribute it,... " etc.

Is there anyone how knows more about these legal issues?
 

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