Joerg Schilling wrote:
Well, now that you found this out, does this mean that you finally concur with me that Bloch & Co. are license trolls?
Not being so emotionally attached to the isse as you are, I'm not going to resort to name calling. I will say that the issue, in my opinion, is nowhere near as clear-cut as they say.
Again, it boils down to precisely where you draw the line between a compilation, which would be a derivative work under copyright law and thus be affected by the terms of the GPL, and a mere distribution, which would probably not by considered a derivative work, and at any rate explicitly excluded by the GPL.
If cdrtools is a "compilation" then the *entire* package must be covered by the GPL because one part of it is. If cdrools is merely an aggregate distribution of individual works, then each work can obviously stand on its own. The fact that you include a single Makefile to build the entire package at once does seem to tilt things in favor of a unified work, but until a court of law makes that ruling, my opinion isn't worth squat.
And because it is ridiculous to claim that the GPL requires you to include the toolchain, it is of course ridiculous to tell people that "the schily makefilesystem" (being a independently developed program) needs to be part of cdrtools.
Again, you are ignoring the plain language of the GPL license itself. It is not ambiguous or unclear or anything like that. It explicitly says: "scripts used to control" the build process. That's not a phrase we just made up, it's *what is in the license*. It's pretty simple:
The cdrtools tarball includes a file called "Makefile" in every directory. The cdrkit includes a file called "CMakeList.txt" in every directory. THAT FILE has a copyright and license terms attached to it, just like any other source file.
In cdrtools, that file is covered by the CDDL. In cdrkit, that file is covered by the GPL. Thus, the cdrtools build system is under a CDDL license and the cdrkit build system is under a GPL license. The *actual program* you use to do the building means nothing to the GPL, so it's pointless to even bring it into the discussion.
--Mike -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
