Re: Debian i386 freeze
Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:
> This whole topic has never particularly made sense to me but now I'm
> totally confused! :-)
>
> On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Buddha Buck wrote:
>
> > Since the MS and Borland libraries, and associated interface files, are
> > normally distributed with the compiler (by definition, a "major
> > component"), you could use them.
>
> Why by definition? The company I work for buys Windows boxes by the
> 100's. None of them come with a C compiler. (For that matter neither do
> most of the Solaris boxes.) But all of them come preloaded with MS
> Office. Does that qualify as a major component for this purpose?
The GPL specifically names the kernel and compiler as major components.
The FSF's position is that these are part of the operating system even
if the vendor is too lame to provide them :-)
> I've heard that Suse and some other distributions do ship with qt. If
> that is the case, is it exempt for them? RMS said Linux is just the
> kernel so we can properly talk of the Suse OS or the Debian OS rather than
> Linux OS.
>
> Of course we are not so inclined, but could Debian simply declare qt a
> "major system component" and end this argument? :-)
The GPL has protection against such trickery built-in: the exemption
does not apply if "... that component itself accompanies the executable".
So if we declare Qt to be a major system component (and include it in
the base system, of course), it would mean that KDE debs could be
distributed as long as they're not part of a Debian distribution.
That doesn't get us very far :-)
> I'm sorry to say that to this layman, the line of reasoning in this
> section of the GPL rather stinks of hypocrisy.
This section was essential in the days before linux, when unix was
being cloned tool by tool, and the tools had to run on existing
(proprietary) unices.
It is still important today, since it lets you distribute GPL'd
binaries without including the code for glibc.
I don't see any hypocrisy here. The exemption makes it more convenient
to distribute binaries, without impeding your ability to recompile the
binaries from source if you want.
Richard Braakman
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