Mono Platform

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 08:25 -0600, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 03:25 -0600, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
> 
> >Exuse me for saying this, but weren't Debian (and thus Ubuntu) folks 
> >unconditional defenders of Free Open Source Software?
> 
> Thats really a question for Debian and Ubuntu. They continue to ship GPL
> applications that decode mp3, which is extremely well patented, without
> an unrestricted patent grant permitting royalty free distribution. 

> This violates the GPL, last time I looked. (IANAL)
IANAL, too, but AFAICT, it depends.

In general, "using closed source apps" from inside of GPL'ed code does
not violate the GPL. It's common practice in many applications (E.g. GCC
using "native binutils" or closed source shared libs on non-GNU
platforms).

Ralf