[Fedora-legal-list] Fedora and MS-PL (Dynamic Language Runtime)

Joerg Schilling Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de
Sun Aug 16 10:49:05 UTC 2009


Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> Can you let me know why it is GPL incompatible?

Any other license (in case that it protects against being hidden
in closed source projects) is incompatibile with the GPL and this is 
caused by the GPL.

While this so called "GPL incompatibility" sounds like a major obstacle,
it only prevents "low level collaboration" i.e. you cannot mix code under 
GPL with code under other licenses _directly_ inside a single "work".

The usual software use cases are not affected by this "GPL incompatibility".
The GPL was designed in the late 1980s to allow a GPLd project to be 
linked against any library under any license as long as this library was 
developed independently (i.e. being a own separate work). This was needed 
in order to make the GPL useful for real world applications.



Jörg

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