I'm not to sure about your question about proprietry code that relies on GPL stuff. When in doubt, I tend to think "What does Debian do?". They never package proprietry code, so that doesn't help. Red Hat and SUSE do, so that makes me think it's ok.

As an example, just because something compiles under gcc doesn't mean it inherits the gcc (GPL license).

Had you modified LWP in any way, however, you would have had to release your LWP changes as GPL.

I'm not familiar with the Artistic License (PERL), but at work we use a product which stealth installs perl on the hard drive without making a mention of it, and then uses it as a back end. This indicates that either it's ok to abuse the perl distribution license a bit or that the authors of this software are over the line.

You are definately allowed to write your own free version of the software that you wrote for your company, but if it looks too similar you leave youself open to charges of copying. The GNU people do this all the time (it's called Chinese Wall or Black Box coding - you try and reproduce the functionality with no knowledge of the inside workings. Gnutella, ICQ and AIM clients were done like this).

Update Chromatic gives a much better answer below.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

In reply to Re: GPL/artistic licence issues by jepri
in thread Non-Disclosure Legal Fun w/ my ex-Employer by idnopheq

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.