Fedora/RH policies sometimes suck
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Thu Apr 12 15:03:14 UTC 2007
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Sometimes the truth is funny... By design, there is no legal way to
>> distribute a combination of GPL'd code and anything with different
>> restrictions.
>
> Do you mean bundled together? You can certainly do that. A copyright
> license cannot outright restrict mere bundles of unrelated components.
I mean as described by the GPL - in anything that can be construed as a
derived work containing any GPL'd code. Such a thing can't be
distributed unless GPL terms can apply to the work as a whole. A clear
example would be patented code (with non-GPL licence restrictions) being
included in the kernel. No one can ever provide that to you.
> The only way a product that includes GPL'd code can
>> contain any of those things is if someone buys the right to allow
>> unlimited free redistribution and there is no practical way for many
>> users to share the cost of that.
>
> Not true as has been indicated many times to you before. Look at
> Freespire for example. They have patent licenses and include proprietary
> codecs for gratis.
Lots of places do lots of things that are not permitted by the GPL so I
can't comment on whether this is a valid counterexample or not. Do
they, for example, supply kernel modules containing code that can't be
freely redistributed? Or programs containing something like the
readline library along with a patented algorithm? As far as I know, the
FSF has never made a clear statement that dynamic linking of plugins is
permitted in cases where a static linkage would not be, so adding codecs
to a GPL'd framework seems pretty fuzzy. There is not a problem with
separate programs that happen to run under Linux, but that's just
because the GPL isn't involved at all in such a case.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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