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I don't think 'shipped' has been clearly defined in court. Let say you extend it in-house, contractors move in, and you let them install the modified development environment on their laptops. Do you have to give them your changes upon request, licensed under the GPL?

Also, if you make a web-based product based on this, and a customer insists on hosting it in its cloud (many do because they do not want to, or in practice aren't allowed to, let their data out of their systems), can you sell it?

In both cases, did your patents just get free for all to use?

The moment you let in GPL code, you either give up having non-GPL code in your company, or you have to start spending time keeping the GPL and non-GPL code apart. If you do the latter, it also affects your flexibility.



Hmmmm.... I don't think these answers are ambiguous. I certainly have never read anything which suggests that your text editor influences what you can deliver.


You should already be tracking the licenses of the code you use. The BSD and MIT licenses both require attribution to the original copyright holders.




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