Misunderstanding GPL's terms and conditions as restrictions

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Mon Jul 28 05:53:54 UTC 2008


On Jul 28, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> You only have to agree to the GPL requirements if you need the
> permissions for modification and distribution the GPL grants.

Who forfeited the opportunity to distribute gnothing under the GPL by
violating the license, then?  Under your theory that the GPL imposes
restrictions on the code licensed under it, someone must have, because
the author only released lib.c as part of a GPL program, and some
licensee managed to somehow escape what you call the restrictions of
the GPL.

At the very least, this shows that your allegations about the
impossibility of using code released as part of GPLed programs under
their former licenses was false.

Now it remains for you to realize that, even if you accept the GPL,
your faulty assumption remains incorrect.

You'll find the answers by asking your lawyer.

>> Show me.  I'm pretty sure you're getting it backwards: the case you
>> cited is one of GPLed library and derived program distributed under an
>> incompatible license.

> The main work was released in source and might have been GPL'd or
> dual licensed but could not because of this library dependency.

Distributed along with the main work, right?

> And because gmp was under GPL at the time

See?  The work was derived from a GPL library.  You got it backwards.

> It was impossible to re-implement the needed functions from RSAREF
> because of the patent

Why couldn't that implementation be GPLed?  And why couldn't it just
be left out of the main work?

> Now for the really strange part: no one ever actually used the fgmp
> library because gmp performed better. However, since it existed and
> it was the linking user's choice which to use, it was no longer
> possible to claim that the main work was derived from the gmp
> library.

A "beautiful" case of circumvention of the spirit of the GPL and of
copyleft by legal technicalities.  Way to go!  NOT

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}




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