Re: The legality of cdrecord
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> wrote:
> Le jeudi 08 novembre 2007 à 11:15 +0100, Joerg Schilling a écrit :
> > "John Halton" <johnhalton@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > As has been said already, the GPL does allow non-GPL code to appear in
> > > GPL projects, but it requires that code then to be distributed under
> > > the GPL. But to do so may infringe the licence for that non-GPL code.
> >
> > This is a false claim! The GPL does not require to change the license of such
> > other code and any lawyer would laugh on you as this would be illegal.
>
> The GPL cannot of course change the license of some other code. However,
> if that other code isn't under the GPL, you cannot link to it. It is as
> simple as that. If the author wanted to allow that, he would have chosen
> the LGPL. And the fact that you can *technically* link GPL code to
> GPL-incompatible code doesn't make it more legal.
The first sentence is correct, all conclusions are of course wrong.
BTW: it is obvious that even RMS concurs with me because he did not sue
Veritas for publishing a modified version of GNU tar.
This Veritas variant of GNU tar:
- comes with makefiles and a few inline modification in the GNU tar
original source
- Needs some libraries that are not under GPL in order to link
- These libraries are _not_ part of the "work" as they have been
written for another purpose.
- These libraries are not published in source but binary only.
- GPL §3 explains that there is a difference between "the work" and
"executable work". For the latter you need only to suply everything
to reproduce the binary.
P.S. This is why cdrtools is GPL compliant but the fork "cdrkit" is
not. "cdrkit" does not include the "cmake" program.
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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