Walter Landry wrote:
Raul Miller <moth@debian.org> wrote:Once again, the only relations between Eclipse and Kaffe are "Eclipse is aggregated with Kaffe" and "Eclipse is run by Kaffe".And once again, you miss the point that Eclipse and Kaffe together make a whole work.The make an aggregate work. However, this aggregate work is not the work which is made when Kaffe is modified.Debian distributes a modified Kaffe and Eclipse together. Section 2 of the GPL does not care whether the modifications made to Kaffe are for making Eclipse work better or not.
What is the difference between the following cases?# Mr Foo packages Kaffe, making modifications to better integrate with Debian # Mr Foo distributes Kaffe' to Mr Bar, complying with the GPL (including Section 2) # Mr Bar distributes Kaffe' along with lots of GPL-incompatible java programs, which he wrote and compiled with Sun's JDK. Note that Kaffe' is completely unmodified.
# Mr Foo packages Kaffe, making modifications to better integrate with Debian # Mr Foo distributes Kaffe' to Mr Bar, complying with the GPL (including Section 2) # Mr Bar distributes Kaffe' to Mr Foo, complying with the GPL. Note that Kaffe' is completely unmodified. # Mr Foo distributes Kaffe' along with lots of GPL-incompatible java programs, which he wrote and compiled with Sun's JDK. Note that Kaffe' is still completely unmodified.
I assert that the GPL does case about the nature of the modifications, because at any point you can distribute a GPLed work to yourself. If the GPLed work is separate from other works under copyright law, it doesn't contaminate them at this point.
If the other works are derivative (as they would probably be in the case where you modified the GPLed work to couple more tightly with the other works), then you have obligations under the GPL at this point to GPL them.
In other words, modifications to the GPLed work that couple the GPL code to another work /may/ incorporate that work to the GPL's definition of 'a work based on the program'. If they do, then it /may/ not be lawful to distribute the GPLed work alongside the other work if the other work is licensed incompatibly. Modifications that do not couple the GPLed work have no effect on other works, because at any point you can distribute the GPLed code to yourself, to receive a new version that is unmodified for the purposes of section two.
-- Lewis Jardine IANAL, IANADD