Re: Questions about liblouis

["Miriam Ruiz" <little.miry@gmail.com>]

2008/2/26, Eitan Isaacson <eitan@ascender.com>:

>  "In addition to the permissions and restrictions contained in the GNU
>  General Public License (GPL), the copyright holders grant two explicit
>  permissions and impose one explicit restriction. The permissions are:
>
>  1) Using, copying, merging, publishing, distributing, sublicensing,
>  and/or selling copies of this software that are either compiled or
>  loaded as part of and/or linked into other code is not bound by the
>  GPL.
>
>  2) Modifying copies of this software as needed in order to facilitate
>  compiling and/or linking with other code is not bound by the GPL.

Am I the only one seeing problems in the wording of these
"permissions"? What does "not bound by the GPL"? One would think that
it might mean having all the rights that the GPL grant to you, but no
restrictions at all, but that's not really clear to me. If I try to
translate that into something like "If you [do a lot of things] with
the software in this conditions, the GPL doesn't apply", it sounds
even more weird. If the GPL doesn't apply, what is the license then?
As it says "permissions", it might be argued that all the freedoms of
the GPL apply, but no restriction at all, which doesn't make any
sense, as it would turn into something like "If you're distributing
the code in a compiled form, or as a part of a bigger software, you
can do whatever you want with it, there are no restrictions at all".
Does it make sense?

Or am I just seeing ghosts and there is no problem at all?

Miry