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

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an 2u la de mi 10, scriobh Niall O Broin :

 > 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. 

As established as anything else about the GPL :-) . 

 > Separate works, and separate packaging, are very different things

Are they? 

 > > [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.

GCC, groff and Emacs are in the box, on the developer CD. You don't
pay seperately for them. That developer CD isn't available
seperately. Mac OSX isn't available sans developer CD. `... as part of
a whole _which_ is a work based on the Program ...' Is that `which,'
descriptive or normative?

 > > 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.

True. Of course, they couldn't have done it were GCC not universally
available and convenient ... downloading & installing GCC *was* the
first thing you did with Solaris 2 , right? :-)

 > 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.

Really? Given that the standard distribution form of Unix software is
a gzipped tarball of _C_ source code? How satisfactory is an OS you
can't install standard packages on? You point me towards a Posixish
system without a C compiler, and I'll show you an embedded
system. :-) . 

 > > 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.

It's not just the compiler, it's a range of tools, admittedly none of
them central to the OS. They are a big chunk of what makes the Unix
experience, though, and Unix was one of the selling points of Mac OSX. 

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

Ehmm, yeah. Me, I prefer my pointless nattering to involve IRC :-). 

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