Octave-forge and legal issues

[Matthias Saou]

Ralf Corsepius wrote :

> On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 16:56 +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:
> > Quentin Spencer wrote :
> > 
> > > 2. Create a modified source tarball with the offending code removed. 
> > > This would be easy, but the source wouldn't match the upstream source.
> > 
> > This has already been done for some packages (e.g. xmms, gstreamer-
> > plugins), and AFAIK is acceptable.
> ... unless the sources are GPL'ed. Not shipping the original sources
> would violate the GPL.

Sounds like FUD. Could you elaborate a bit more? For me, this would
clearly be a case of "work based on the program", which is something the
GPL permits and even encourages (see section 2 of the license).

Anyway, in this particular case, if the original program states it's
GPL'ed when it in fact contains bits of incompatible-licensed code, it's
quite a different situation :-(

Matthias

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