Re: endorsements disclaimer as part of the warranty statement
Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:
> On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 02:08:56PM -0400, Jeremy Hankins wrote:
>> I had a hypothetical all ready that would show how someone could use
>> the sort of tunneling you were talking about to tie malicious code
>> (e.g., spyware, or copy-right checking code) to something else and
>> claim the result was GPL, despite being unable to prune the nasty
>> stuff out.... But I guess that's superfluous now. ;)
>
> I still think you'd be wrong. *As long as* you're combining the
> non-GPLed work with a GPLed work, you either:
>
> 1) can remove any part of the non-GPLed work you want except for its
> legal texts (copyright notices, licese texts, warranty statements)
> 2) can remove all of the non-GPLed work, including the legal texts since
> they don't apply if none of the work is present
> 3) cannot distribute the work at all
It'd be a bit more complicated. Say you have some dvd reading code
whose license says that so long as it's used in conjunction with the
functions in evil.c (which is GPL'd) the resultant work can be
distributed under the GPL. But if you remove and/or disable evil.c
the original code reverts to a license under which you can't
distribute it at all. Perhaps evil.c must have a particular checksum
in order for the whole to be under the GPL. The licensor would argue
that it's GPL compatible since, after all, the whole thing is under
the GPL. It's only when you remove a certain portion of the code that
another portion of the code suddenly reverts to a different
(non-)license.
I don't know if it'd *actually* be possible to make this work (what
does it mean to disable evil.c? Though maybe evil.c replaces certain
libc functions), and it would obviously be easy to reverse engineer
the code. But nonetheless, I don't think it'd really be GPL
compatible.
Anyway, this is getting silly at this point, since our disagreement is
a bit beside the point by now.
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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