Just a couple of comments.
On 12/30/2012 12:25 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
The Drupal
people are wrong, and this is the nature of their mistake.
I never said anything about what interpretation others in the Drupal
community put on this. I was giving my own interpretation based on my
best understanding of the intent of the GPL. So, feel free to tell me
I'm wrong, but don't blame anyone else besides me.
Then: the GPLv2 does not restrict you from taking two different pieces
of work under different licenses and combining them together for your
own use; it restricts you from DISTRIBUTING such a work under any
license other than the GPL. Moreover, it contains clauses which
prohibit distribution of a work as a whole which contains pieces with
restrictions which would prevent it from being distributed under the
GPL. But you can distribute them separately, under their respective
licenses. The trick here is, what constitutes separate distribution?
It seems clear that statically linking your non-GPL library into your
program and distributing the resulting binary is prohibited. But what
about a CD which contains the source code for both, but each in a
separate directory that contains their respective licenses? Such a CD
is very arguably "a work containing the Program or a portion of it,
either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another
language..." This is a question you'd likely need a courtroom to
decide. You're best off avoiding it if possible.
You're right that the restriction is on DISTRIBUTING the work, but you
seem to be considering only two kinds of licenses: the GPL and
GPL-incompatible licenses. There's another class of licenses that the
FSF has evaluated and determined to be GPL-compatible. I'm pretty sure
the limitation is not that all its parts must be distributed under the
GPL, but rather that all parts must be distributed under GPL-compatible
licenses. E.G. - if you incorporate something you got under the
GPL-compatible MIT License, distributing it as part of a work containing
other parts licensed under the GPL is permissible, and doing so will not
change the licensing on that part of the work from the MIT License to
the GPL.
Mark
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