On Jul 28, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > You only have to agree to the GPL requirements if you need the > permissions for modification and distribution the GPL grants. Who forfeited the opportunity to distribute gnothing under the GPL by violating the license, then? Under your theory that the GPL imposes restrictions on the code licensed under it, someone must have, because the author only released lib.c as part of a GPL program, and some licensee managed to somehow escape what you call the restrictions of the GPL. At the very least, this shows that your allegations about the impossibility of using code released as part of GPLed programs under their former licenses was false. Now it remains for you to realize that, even if you accept the GPL, your faulty assumption remains incorrect. You'll find the answers by asking your lawyer. >> Show me. I'm pretty sure you're getting it backwards: the case you >> cited is one of GPLed library and derived program distributed under an >> incompatible license. > The main work was released in source and might have been GPL'd or > dual licensed but could not because of this library dependency. Distributed along with the main work, right? > And because gmp was under GPL at the time See? The work was derived from a GPL library. You got it backwards. > It was impossible to re-implement the needed functions from RSAREF > because of the patent Why couldn't that implementation be GPLed? And why couldn't it just be left out of the main work? > Now for the really strange part: no one ever actually used the fgmp > library because gmp performed better. However, since it existed and > it was the linking user's choice which to use, it was no longer > possible to claim that the main work was derived from the gmp > library. A "beautiful" case of circumvention of the spirit of the GPL and of copyleft by legal technicalities. Way to go! NOT -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
