Fedora/RH policies sometimes suck

[Les Mikesell]

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