RE: Is this seperate enough to escape the GPL?

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http://forums.oscommerce.com/viewtopic.php?p=205722#205722
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It depends how the two interact.  If your program just edits templates for osCommerce, you can certainly do that.  However, if your program needs to understand the osCommerce logic, you would have to find a way to separate it from the main program.

For example, if you create a proprietary program that can read two files (a template and a code file) and produce osCommerce code from them, that would be all right, *if* all the osCommerce specific information was in the two files.  You can make it edit the files if there is no osCommerce specific information needed to understand them.  For example, I (or even Bill Gates) can use WordPad to edit my index.php file without any GPL claims being involved.  However, if I had the source code for a WordPad like product, modified it to recognize osCommerce syntax, and distributed a new binary of the program (assuming that I had the right to do so), then it would have to be distributed under the GPL.  

The most definite thing would be to rewrite OSC code without affecting your original program.  If you could do this, then there wouldn't be a problem.  More practically, you could rewrite your program to enable the integration of a template and a code file without problem, *if* there is nothing in the program itself that is osCommerce specific.  A good test of this is if you can also write template and code files for other applications, like phpBB.

Hth,
Matt