Re: Forking and relicensing issues (different)
On Mon, May 10, 1999 at 09:37:07AM -0400, Collins M. Ben wrote:
> On Mon, May 10, 1999 at 09:22:18AM -0400, Nils Lohner wrote:
> > I have a question along the same lines, but in a different area. I'm pretty
> > sure situations like this have come up before, but I don't know how they
> > were handled. This is just from a discussion I had with someone.
> >
> > Can you take GPL'ed code and use it with a closed source program? i.e.
> > take the GPL'ed program do_everything and someone wants to write a library
> > for it that's do_one_more_thing but keep the library closed, is that OK? If
> > they want to distribute and sell that, they distribute the source code to
> > the GPL part (with modifications), and the binary (executable), right? I
> > would assume it is, but modifications etc. to the original GPL code must be
> > made public. Am I missing something here, or is that about the extent of
> > it? Or is that illegal under the GPL and the entire source code must be
> > made public because its used with some GPL'ed code?
>
> I suggest going to ftp.be.com and checking out the /pub/gnu directory.
> They have done exactly this with their boot loader. It uses some parts of
> the Linux kernel (those parts are released in source), and some parts are
> proprietary (thos parts are only in .o object format). So you can
> conceivably rebuild the boot loader with the source and objects provided.
>
I think NeXT tried to do this and ended up releasing the full source to
their Objective C compiler.
--
Brian Ristuccia
brianr@osiris.978.org
bristucc@nortelnetworks.com
bristucc@cs.uml.edu
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