Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL
Putting GPL-covered programs together with non-free programs in a
collection such as an operating system does not violate the GPL, and
Corel is not the first to do this. I think this is a harmful practice,
and that even Debian goes too far in this direction, but there is no
use singling out Corel for criticism.
Making people agree to a license with conditions about the use of the
non-free programs, as part of obtaining the GPL-covered programs,
might be a violation, but I am not sure. **As long as the license
imposes no conditions on the use of the GPL-covered programs, other
than the GPL,** one can argue that this is simply a way of choosing
to distribute the GPL-covered programs only to those who are customers
for the others. That is legitimate.
I think the crucial question here is, has Corel written significant
new free software? And what license(s) are they using for it?
Reply to: