[ILUG] Red Hat in Easons.

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an 2u la de mi 10, scriobh cybersean3000 at yahoo.com :

 > You can do what you want with it, you just need to give others the 
 > opportunity to do what they want with it (ie make source code freely 
 > available).  Even the Linux based commercial product I worked on, had a 
 > price tag of US$1mill, and we were legally required to provide a seperate 
 > source code CD for the free stuff we used.  The bits we developed and 
 > included in the binary installable package,  were not required to be 
 > released as source, because we did not release is under a GPL or other 
 > freeware license.

You can't make it part of your (proprietary-licensed) product; that
was why, for example, Apple (Yeah, I'm referring to Steve & co. a lot
here.) originally weren't going to ship their GCC with OSX, but just
put it up for download. As it is now, it comes on a seperate CD, which
is theoretically a seperate, free product. (IIRC, etc.) This is an
Ugly Hack, and shaky legally. CF, from
/usr/local/SmallEiffel/GNU_LICENSE:99 on my box;

"b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part
thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties
under the terms of this License."

This is only enforced; (from a few lines further down)

"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the
Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate
works in themselves[1], then this License, and its terms, do not apply
to those sections when you distribute them as separate works[2].  But
when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a
work based on the Program[3], the distribution of the whole must be on
the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees
extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless
of who wrote it."

[1] Let's say, Quartz & Aqua. 
[2] Okay, GPl dosen't apply to them, as long as you don't distribute
them with GPLed software. 
[3] But we are distributing them with GPLed software. Now, how `based
on' GCC (and groff, and Emacs) is a shrink-wraped OSX cardboard box
with several CDs inside? They're certainly inside the box. And a C
compiler is a fairly fundamental tool on a Unix system, in
fairndes. Hmm. Should quartz and Aqua be GPLed?

Are the development tools really a seperate product from Mac OSX?
Were your modications to those _F_ree tools really a seperate product
from the thing as a whole? I don't actually know, and I'd be surprised
if you did. 

(This is why I hoped discussion of the GPL was off topic here. This is
not productive :-)

-- 
`... when the elephant man broke strong men's necks, when he'd had too 
many Powers, ...'