On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 06:07:33PM +0100, David Schmitt wrote: > > [0] Presuming the FSF's claims about dynamic linking hold up in this > > case, anyway. > I consider a Debian-derived distribution a derived work of the contained > Debian tools in more ways than "mere" dynamic linking. That doesn't much matter -- Debian doesn't claim any copyright on its efforts in collecting work, so deriving from Debian doesn't involve any copyrights but that of the aggregate parts you use. The relevant parts are the licenses of individual packages that get linked against OpenSolaris' libc, and whether libc counts as a "module [the program] contains" and is thus covered as part of the "complete source code" as part of paragraph 3(a) of the GPL. > To be more specific: I don't believe that the fact that software A is being > packaged with Debians tools is a derived work of said tools, That's not actually the question -- the only "derivative" issue is that Nexenta's dpkg (eg) is a derivative of Debian's dpkg (or gcc is a derivative of upstream gcc) and thus covered by the GPL. The FSF argues (and Debian accepts) that dynamic linking should be legally treated the same as static linking, and thus that an executable that would contain libc when statically linked must be treated as "containing" libc when dynamically linked too. In this case, that's a pretty tenuous argument, but in other cases it's not so tenuous (linking to OpenSSL for example) and in such cases it has been an effective argument at getting libraries relicensed to be GPL compatible (such as for Qt). (Actually, it's probably worth noting that the core argument -- that /usr/bin/dpkg "contains" libc and thus that the former can't be distributed under the GPL without also distributing the source to the latter under the GPL -- is tenuous enough that actually following through on the legal threats we've seen could result in the argument being rejected, giving a precedent for all the folks who'd like to modify GPLed programs to rely on proprietary libraries.) > I'd like to add (d) distributing as source only. Compiling the whole thing on > the users system Note that compiling Nexenta involves using gcc, so you'd need to cross-compile from a glibc system, or you'd have the same problem in that you'd be distributing libc and gcc (which is GPLed and links to libc) together. > On other news, private communication by the gnusolaris.org people lead me to > the conviction that they are internally working on resolving their problems > with the legalese and we should give them a break. I will keep you informed > about their progress. Ugh; giving people a break's a good thing, but doing things in private and behind closed doors isn't. Participating in Debian in public can be (unreasonably) rough, but closing yourself up from the community and having communication bottle necks isn't a win either. Cheers, aj
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