Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez <clopez@igalia.com> writes: > On 30/03/17 21:29, Don Armstrong wrote: >> On Thu, 30 Mar 2017, Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez wrote: >>> * License Must Not Contaminate _Other_ Software >> >> A work which is a derivative work of another piece of software isn't >> merely distributed alongside. >> >>> Shipping a collection of software on a DVD doesn't make any of this >>> pieces of software a derivative works one of the other. >> >> Precisely. It only has bearing on whether the system library exception >> to derivative works applies. >> > > It should apply. > > Fedora and RHEL ship also DVD images, and they do use this system > exception clause of the GPL for linking with OpenSSL. Perhaps they have decided to ignore the bit of the license that says: "unless that component itself accompanies the executable." but I think it is more likely that they've had their lawyers look at each particular case that they wanted to include in their distro, in order to assess how realistic it is for there to be a problem with the result, and how painful it will be to fix if there is a problem. If we were to do a similar assessment, then we'd be asking the lawyers different questions, because we also care about how likely it to cause a problem for any of our downstreams (and their downstreams, etc.) or any of the users. RedHat are also in a position to offer indemnity against legal problems caused by using their distribution, if they want to, whereas we can only try to avoid the problem. So, pointing at the fact that RedHat has on occasion decided to violate the license in this way does nothing to prove that the violation does not exist. Nor does it make the exception to the exception go away, and we clearly are causing the "component" and the "executable" to "accompany" one another if installing a binary by whatever means causes OpenSSL to automatically be installed because of the dependency. I really doubt that any court of law will be particularly interested in the mechanisms that achieve that effect, so it's not just a case of making sure that the two things are not on the same DVD. Cheers, Phil. P.S. I am not a lawyer P.P.S. Does anyone really expect a consensus to emerge where we decide to ignore the exception to the exception across the board without consulting lawyers? I think there are several people in this thread (myself included) that have demonstrated that they're going to argue against such a consensus. That being the case, it's not going to happen, so repeating the same justifications for why there is no problem does not seem even slightly productive to me. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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