Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> writes:

> As has been settled on this list, Eclipse is not a derivative of Kaffe
> and does not contain any copyright-protected portion of Kaffe.  It is
> possible to claim that "Eclipse+Kaffe" is a work based on Kaffe, but
> by the same argument, "Debian" is a work based on Kaffe, and the
> rational interpretation is that both cases are mere aggregation.

It seems to me that "mere aggregation" must be the smallest idea that
is still aggregation.  For example, Emacs and Vim are merely
aggregated in Debian.  wget and openssl are not merely aggregated,
because there's more going on there.  It's not necessary to look in
great detail at what *is* going on there -- it's enough to say that
there is more there, so it's not merely aggregation.  It's aggregation
and something else.

I think it *is* legal to distribute a GPL-incompatible thing relying
on GNU readline, as long as you aren't distributing readline with it.

Similarly, Kaffe and Eclipse will be more than merely aggregated.
It's certainly legal to distribute them separately, but when
distributing them together the restrictions of GPL 2b come into play,
unless it can be shown that they are merely aggregated.

Since there is a stronger relationship there than the weakest relation
that could be called aggregation, it isn't mere aggregation.  It's
aggregation and something else.  Thus, GPL 2b applies.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu