Re: The draft Position statement on the GFDL

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>]

Raul Miller wrote:

> On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 05:37:51PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
>> This is allowed by the GPL and required to be allowed by the DFSG, of
>> course, as long as the resulting gcc binary can be distributed under the
>> terms of the
>> GPL.  The GPL doesn't care what kinds of changes you make (with very
>> limited exceptions, such as the license blurb).
> 
> Only if the resulting work (including the implementation of the support
> for those keywords) is distributable under the terms of the GPL.

<snip>
> Or, maybe you're saying that when integrating with foo it's reasonable
> to ask the programmer doing the integration to reimplement foo under the
> terms of the GPL?  [Let's say that the programmer in question isn't the
> author of foo.]

What are you saying here?

It is reasonable to require that the programmer does not look at the
copyrighted implementation of foo, and only looks at the freely
implementable interface documentation for foo.  That way the "GCC
integrated with foo" work is not a derivative work of foo.

Or are you talking about "integrating" something in a way which would
involve a merger of two code bases to the point where they were not
separable?  Well, in that case, indeed, we might find that
GCC-integrated-with-foo cannot be distributed without relicensing of one or
the other.

-- 
There are none so blind as those who will not see.