Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Sometimes the truth is funny... By design, there is no legal way to
distribute a combination of GPL'd code and anything with different
restrictions.
Do you mean bundled together? You can certainly do that. A copyright
license cannot outright restrict mere bundles of unrelated components.
I mean as described by the GPL - in anything that can be construed as a
derived work containing any GPL'd code. Such a thing can't be
distributed unless GPL terms can apply to the work as a whole. A clear
example would be patented code (with non-GPL licence restrictions) being
included in the kernel. No one can ever provide that to you.
The only way a product that includes GPL'd code can
contain any of those things is if someone buys the right to allow
unlimited free redistribution and there is no practical way for many
users to share the cost of that.
Not true as has been indicated many times to you before. Look at
Freespire for example. They have patent licenses and include proprietary
codecs for gratis.
Lots of places do lots of things that are not permitted by the GPL so I
can't comment on whether this is a valid counterexample or not. Do
they, for example, supply kernel modules containing code that can't be
freely redistributed? Or programs containing something like the
readline library along with a patented algorithm? As far as I know, the
FSF has never made a clear statement that dynamic linking of plugins is
permitted in cases where a static linkage would not be, so adding codecs
to a GPL'd framework seems pretty fuzzy. There is not a problem with
separate programs that happen to run under Linux, but that's just
because the GPL isn't involved at all in such a case.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
