Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] ClearSight/GPL update

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2004 at 02:58:58PM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> In addition, whether or not OLE serves to sufficiently distance Ethereal 
> from the ClearSight product depends on the implementation technique. If it 
> uses any form of dynamic linking, then I think they still have a problem 
> with theirs being a derived work. However, I am not familiar enough with 
> OLE to be able to say.

The impression I have is that an OLE server (Ethereal is presumably
acting as an OLE server) can either be "in-process", in which case it's
a DLL and requests from the client to the server are done by loading the
DLL if it's not already loaded and calling code in the DLL, or
"out-of-process", in which case it's a separate executable and some
interprocess message channel is used to convey the request and the
results.

If it's in-process, that's a form of dynamic linking; I'd say only
software with a GPL-compatible license could use a GPL'ed in-process
server.

If it's out-of-process, you could probably argue that the connection
between the client and server doesn't require that a GPL'ed
out-of-process server be used only by clients with GPL-compatible
licenses.