Les Mikesell wrote:
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.
GPL license does not involve unrelated components. You claimed that a combination is not possible. It certainly is. The restrictions on a copyright license can only apply to code that uses it. Merely combining components cannot ever be restricted by a copyright license.
The only way a product that includes GPL'd code cancontain 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.
It is. Do your basic fact checks before you repeatedly claim things which are not true. A Linux distribution can definitely include code with different restrictions from GPL. In fact pretty much all the Linux distributions do that.
Rahul
