Comment by mikegerwitz
9 years ago
moron4hire is correct.
If you are not distributing the software personally or outside your organization, the GPL does not apply to you. If what you are doing does not constitute a derivative work, then your software is also not affected by the GPL: if you're invoking GNU grep in your program, for example, your program does not need to be licensed under a GPL-compatible license.
For clarification, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
I am aware of these issues. I replied in-haste in-class, and didn't specify that I was only referring to library code. I instead used 'work', which was the wrong term; I apologize. Anyway, according to the GPL, using a GPL-ed library as a dependency in a larger codebase constitutes a derivative work (assuming distribution etc), thus requiring GPL-ing the whole larger codebase, which isn't cool (imo, of course).