[ILUG] Re: GPL and Apple (was Red Hat in Easons ? ?)

[Niall O Broin]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 02:38:46AM +0100, Aidan Kehoe wrote:

> 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."

It's long been established that shipping a GPL'ed piece of software WITH
some other software does NOT bring that software under the GPL despite what
Micro$oft would like you to believe. 

> 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. 

Separate works, and separate packaging, are very different things

> [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

It's not based on GCC. Created with, certainly, but that's not a question at
all.

> 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?

One of the world's largest proprietary Unix vendors, Sun Microsystems,
haven't shipped a C compiler as standard with their Unix systems for years.
You may regard a C compiler as a fundamental tool on a Unix system (as do I,
and I was well pissed off when Sun dropped the bundled compiler when they
brought out Solaris 2) but the operating system operates perfectly well
without it.

> 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. 

For what value of know ? I believe them to be completely separate, although
interdependent things. A compiler for MacOS X is pretty useless with MacOS
X, but the converse is not true.

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

If being productive was a touchstone, this'd become a much quieter list :-)




Niall