On Sat, Aug 23, 2003 at 06:27:08PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > > And
> > > their intentions are: "MIT/X11, except you may not distribute this
> > > product alone".
> > I'm not particularly convinced it's not compatible with the GPL, either.
> > If you're trying to distribute the product alone, then the GPL has
> > absolutely no relevance. If you're distributing it with something, GPLed
> > or not, then it's apparently the same as MIT/X11, which is GPL compatible.
> [If this were valid, then the GPL wouldn't be incompatible with the
> Artistic license either].
No, that's not the case, since the Artistic license isn't "MIT/X11, except
you may not distribute this product alone".
> An abbreviated form of the so-called "viral" part of the GPL says that
> everything you include in a GPLed work must be distributable under the
> GPL.
This isn't quite accurate: it says that it must be distributable under the
terms of the GPL. That is, if you follow the requirements of the GPL, then
you're also obeying the requirements of whatever the actual license is.
> Therefore, in order to link a GPLed application with glibc, I need to
> be able to distribute the source code to glibc under the GPL as well.
Again, under _the terms of_ the GPL.
> From this I can conclude that I need to be able to distribute any
> given component of the glibc source code under the GPL.
Which isn't correct.
You need to be able to distribute the end product under the terms of
the GPL, which you can; the original parts don't matter, since if you're
distributing those, you're not bound by the GPL at all.
Consider, as another example, the following program:
#!/bin/sh
# Capital-AJ version 1.0
# Copyright (c) 2003 Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
# All rights reserved
find /foo -type f | grep 'aj' | while read a; do
x="`echo "$a" | sed 's/aj/AJ/g'`"
mv "$a" "$x"
done
and the following derivative:
#!/bin/sh
# Capital-AJ version 1.1
# Copyright (c) 2003 Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
# May be freely used/copied/etc under the terms of the GNU GPL v2.
export LANG=C
word="$1"
if [ "$word" = "" ]; then
word="aj"
fi
worduc="`echo "$word" | tr a-z A-Z`"
find /foo -type f | grep "$word" | while read a; do
x="`echo "$a" | sed "s/$word/$worduc/g"`"
mv "$a" "$x"
done
Version 1.1 and third party derivatives are clearly under the GPL, but
that doesn't mean you can use it to make a copy of version 1.0 that's
under the GPL, any more than you can start with a blank page and convert
that to a copy of version 1.0 without violating copyright.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Is this some kind of psych test?
Am I getting paid for this?''
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