2006-02-15 (水) の 23:36 -0600 に Mike McCarty さんは書きました: > It states that > section 6 states the terms for "distribution of such executables". So > one might argue that if one links such an executable on his own > machine > by linking it at load time, but does not distribute it, then 6 has no > force, since it is not distributed. That's the point. Publication is the primary thing which is regulated in both GPL and LGPL, not execution. That is one of the major differences between the attitude of traditional EULAs and the approach taken by the GPL. (And it is one of the big reasons you do a lot of compiling FreeBSD and its packages from source, although I think they ride the line a little thin in a number of cases.) In other words, if you have something which is legally distributed under the GPL, the author says you are free to run it pretty much any way you please, aggregate it pretty much any way you please, modify it pretty much anyway you please, compile or decompile it pretty much as you please, as long as you do not redistribute it in any way except the way prescribed by the license. I say "pretty much" because some people have tried to interpret aggregation or something in a way that ended up being distribution, and the actual words of the license do not allow that. I might assume that your lawyer friends did not take the time to understand the license well enough to recognize such fine distinctions as the above. I would bet they assumed restrictions on running the programs because those have been the whole point of about half the terms of EULAs until the GPL, and also because you described their responses in such terms. (If it was free advice, one could understand why they would not take the time, but I don't recall how much you said you paid them for the analysis.) I don't begrudge them an error for two reasons, one being that time is the most valuable thing to a professional, the other that this is an easy mistake to make in an economic climate where licenses are usually designed to control what people do with a thing as much as whether they re-distribute the thing. But if you're going to come here and take the time to disparage the license which made a lot of programmers feel free to help build Linux, you should first take the time to understand what it is you disparage.
