Re: Implied exceptions to GPL?
> On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 01:16, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> > On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 12:44:55AM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 00:30, Brian May wrote:
> > > > 2. If you wrote and released the program under the GPL, and you designe
> d
> > > > it specifically to work with those facilities, people can take that as
> > > > an implicit exception permitting them to link it with those facilities.
> > > > But if that is what you intend, it is better to say so explicitly.
> > > >
> > > > 3. You can't take someone else's GPL-covered code and use it that way,
> > > > or add such exceptions to it. Only the copyright holders of that code
> > > > can add the exception.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Point 2 says you can take someone else's code...
> > >
> > > There's the rub. Point two talks about your code, not someone else's.
> > > Notice the second word in point 2 for evidence.
> >
> > Point two is saying that people (other than the copyright holder) might
> > infer that permission is implicit, which is what he's referring to, I
> > think.
>
> Perhaps. I took them to imply modification of the code in question to
> link to the incompatible library.
>
> IOW, if A is the copyright holder to a (GPL), and a must link to b (old
> BSD), then B can assume that point 2 holds. However, if A writes a, and
> B modifies a to require b (when a didn't require b before), then point 3
> must hold, for B and everyone else. So, the clauses don't contradict
> each other.
That's what I understood.
I think that point 2 is consistent with what RMS said about KDE before
the Qt license change. He said we coul assume that GPL'ed KDE code had
implicit permission to link against Qt, but that KDE shouldn't contain
foreign GPL'ed code not originally written for Qt.
Another interesting example: Emacs is a GPL'ed interpreter has you can
hardly code for without using it's GPL'ed bindings. Therefore external
elisp code must be distributed under a GPL-compatible license. At some
point we should go over all the elisp packages in Debian to make sure
that's true.
Peter
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