Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe
Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org> wrote:
> Walter Landry wrote:
> > Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org> wrote:
> >
>
> > You have made a very convincing argument that "required to install" is
> > too broad. My criteria is "required to run".
>
> I've showed that your interpretation of 'required to run' is too broad,
> as you attempt to stretch it in the same direction, by arguing from the
> 'but they are both installed together in main' angle.
>
> Eclipse does not require Kaffe to run, it runs very well on many other
> VMs. Eclipse in main would require Kaffe to be installed, but wouldn't
> necessarily require it run, as you still could run it perfectly fine
> with other VMs.
I feel like we are going in circles here. I have answered this claim
before [1].
> > When Debian puts Eclipse into main, Debian is distributing Eclipse to
> > be used with Kaffe. When it is in contrib, Debian is distributing
> > Eclipse to be used by something outside of main.
>
> Nope. The GPL does not allow you to say 'you must use this data with
> that program and that program alone'. That interpretation of the GPL
> would violate freedom 0.
>
> You have no right to limit how I run a program I get from you licensed
> under the GPL.
The issue is not running the program, it is _distributing_. If you
distribute readline by itself, that is fine. If you distribute
GPL-incompatible program Foo which uses readline by itself, you might
be ok. You are definitely not ok when you distribute them together.
> If you do that, you lose the rights to distribute the program under
> the GPL at all, as the GPL does not allow you to add restrictions to
> it. That hold for Kaffe just as well as it holds for, say, your
> http://www.nongnu.org/arx/ project. You can't restrict me to use ArX
> only for GPLd projects, in general.
I do not want this to become an advertisement for my project. Let me
just say that I am well aware of the licensing problems, and I have
been working with the relevant authors to fix it. Because of these
problems, I have not encouraged anyone to package it.
Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00679.html
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