Re: The draft Position statement on the GFDL
Scripsit Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>
> > > People without proper palladium licenses would not have the rights
> > > required by the gpl.
> On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 09:18:28PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> > Why not?
> Because palladium is a proprietary work, and it's more than just an OS.
That has no influence on the right to distribute the hypothetical
GCC-that-cooperates-with-palladium.
> I was not proposing "make gcc work on that OS", I was proposing functional
> modifications to GCC to make it integrate better with that environment.
There is nothing in the GPL that forbids functional modifications to
GCC to make it integrate better with the environment.
> As a rough idea, imagine if gcc were made to support special keywords or
> control files to make it easier to build programs which use palladium's
> proprietary encryption and digital rights management facilities object
> model.
There is nothing wrong with that. As long as the modified GCC itself
is distributed with source and under the terms of the GPL everything
is fine.
> Or, more generally, imagine any change which makes gcc into
> something that works in a proprietary fashion.
If it is distributed with source and under the terms of the GPL, then
whatever it does is by any reasonable understandning not done "in a
proprietary fashion".
> You said:
> With the DFSG we promise to our users that they can take any software
> in main and modify it for any purpose...
> To make proprietary software is a purpose.
No. Proprietariness is not a functional property. Which kinds of
modifications I am allowed to make is a question that is completely
orthogonal to which terms I can distribute them under.
> > > Not if this means that making copies of the derived work is forbidden
> > > by the gpl.
> > Making copies of the derived work is *not* forbidden by the GPL.
> You mean because it's outside the scope of the GPL?
No, on the contrary. Making copies of the derived work is what the GPL
is all about. It exists in order to allow me to make copies of the
derived (or non-derived) work.
--
Henning Makholm "Monarki, er ikke noget materielt ... Borger!"
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