Re: Heart of the debate
Personally I think that it is theoretically possible to license a binary under
the GPL, but I don't think it make much sense to do so, (it's equivalent to
applying the GPL to say a file of raw binary data of rainfall measurements).
For instance Section 0 of the GPL requires that in order to apply the GPL to a
work that work must contain a notice saying it may be "distributed under the
terms of this General Public License".
I would assume in source code form this would be done by the use of comments.
However the act of compilation would strip out the comments leaving no such
notice in the binaries.
Now on this system
$strings grep | grep -i General
$strings grep | grep -i GPL
$strings grep | grep -i GNU
GNU e?grep, version 1.6
$
(I also did a strings grep | more just to be sure).
Thus I conclude that the binary for GNU grep contains no such notice and is not
licensed under the GPL. (The source code is a different matter entirely).
<offtopic>
I'm wondering if this means the binary is put in the public domain? This could
be a serious problem for GPLed Java code, as Java decompilers are very good.
</offtopic>
BFN,
Don.
On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Andreas Pour wrote:
> Raul Miller wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 12:02:31PM -0500, Andreas Pour wrote:
> > > I think this is where you went off-track. Section 2 only refers to
> > > source code distributions (as it requires the modifications to be
> > > distributed under Section 1 and Section 1 deals only with source
> > > code).
> >
> > I disagree.
> >
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