I'm designing a software as a service project which will only be accessed online. I may have a hard dependency on an executable which is covered by GNU GPL (v2 or later).I understand that my code, if I were ever to distribute it, must be distributed under the GPL terms as well. I am pretty sure that running the service over the network is not conveying/distributing the code. Thus, am I correct in thinking that I may use the GPL dependency without having to disclose all my code?Just so I can provide a concrete example: Let's say I'm designing on online document processing system, kind of like Google Docs. I want to be able to upload basically any file type into the system and have it get converted to whatever internal format. Instead of trying to scratch out a converter, I'd rather use an existing program I know about that allows for the conversion. This program is an executable with GNU GPL v2 (or later) licensing. Can I legally have a software-as-a-service without providing my source code?
Running software as a service using unmodified GPL(v2+) program as a core dependency: must the SaaS source code be released?
open source;licensing;gpl;software as a service