You may find more opportunities in your field in research instead. What I have in mind is REU, Research Experiences for Undergraduate, a program sponsored by the NSF. There are many sites in the US - but there are also many abroad. My roommate spent a summer at CERN, loved it so much, spend the following semester there as well. Receiving a stipend, instead of paying for courses, is nice too. If you need credit, I'm sure you can talk to a professor to sponsor you for independent study credit.

Then they don't need to show you anything and can ignore your request - especially if the ShowMyPC program and VNC "communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program." On their page they don't say it is a GPL program, but based on open source programs. ShowMyPC should have a page like this that explains how they do not violate GPL http://www.crossloop.com/VNC.html What's most relevant to this topic is probably this. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCGPLInP roprietarySystem I'd like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary system. Can I do this? You cannot incorporate GPL-covered software in a proprietary system. The goal of the GPL is to grant everyone the freedom to copy, redistribute, understand, and modify a program. If you could incorporate GPL-covered software into a non-free system, it would have the effect of making the GPL-covered software non-free too. A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program must be released under the GPL if it is released at all. This is for two reasons: to make sure that users who get the software get the freedom they should have, and to encourage people to give back improvements that they make. However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program. The difference between this and "incorporating" the GPL-covered software is partly a matter of substance and partly form. The substantive part is this: if the two programs are combined so that they become effectively two parts of one program, then you can't treat them as two separate programs. So the GPL has to cover the whole thing. If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two separate programs--but you have to do it properly. The issue is simply one of form: how you describe what you are doing. Why do we care about this? Because we want to make sure the users clearly understand the free status of the GPL-covered software in the collection. If people were to distribute GPL-covered software calling it "part of" a system that users know is partly proprietary, users might be uncertain of their rights regarding the GPL-covered software. But if they know that what they have received is a free program plus another program, side by side, their rights will be clear.