Michael Meskes <meskes@online-club.de> writes: Pardon me, but I haven't followed this discussion closely enough. Could anyone please tell me in two or three words why it is illegal to distribute KDE which is GPLed but linked to a non-free library, but not illegal to distribute an Emacs binary linked against (for instance) SUN's libc, which isn't free either. Because Sun's libc is included with Sun's operating system. This is an explicit exception listed in the GPL.