Re: On interpreting licences (was: KDE not in Debian?)
On Fri, Feb 11, 2000 at 05:26:47PM +0100, Marc van Leeuwen wrote:
> Nobody in this "discussion" is claiming (as far as I can see) that
> by some subtle shuffling of pieces you can get a (composite) program
> from A to B without requiring permissions from all copyright owners.
It seems to me that that's exactly what people are saying when they
claim that it's legal to distribute kghostscript.
> The point is that the complex conditions in the licences, in partcular
> GPL, may lead to a situation where such permission may be obtained for
> some particular method of distribution, but not for some other method.
> For instance, you may distribute in source form (and under GPL) a
> GPL-ed an application that links to Qt (because then there is no
> requirement to distribute "complete sources"), while also distributing
> Qt (in source and binary) under QPL; the recipient could compile and
> link an executable program which does not "happen to spring into
> existence", and which was the goal of distributing the GPL sources,
> yet which could not have been legally distributed directly.
Certainly: it's only if you distribute executables or object code that
there's any requirement to distribute the complete source for the program.
> I think you put forward yourself another example (a Solaris-linked
> GPL binary and Solaris itself), where the components might be legally
> distributed separately (assuming permission from Sun) but not
> together.
Right: that was an example of a situation which takes advantage of the
special exception in section 3 of the GPL.
> So please don't suggest any more that people are trying to evade
> copyright law when in fact they are trying (maybe by jumping through
> hoops) to abide by the conditions put forth in the licence(s).
Are you now claiming that it's legal to distribute kghostscript?
--
Raul
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