On Sat, 1 Jun 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Jun 2002, Diego Iastrubni wrote:
>
> > On Saturday 01 June 2002 02:41, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > > On Fri, 31 May 2002, Diego Iastrubni wrote:
> > > > job job, someone has to speak for those who cannt ('cause they are coding
> > > > too much) He _is_ right. The day this will happen a big part of freedom
> > > > will be ported to win32 platform.
> >
> > > It is legally possible to port GPLed software to Win32. In fact, this has
> > > happened with Cygnus and Friends. This is in a similar spirit to the fact
> > > that GPLed software can be run on proprietary UNIXes.
> >
> > i was joking. what i meant was that gpl software can be reproduced freely,
> > while those packages (build open free sources) are not freely available. If
> > indeed i missread th gpl, kde/gnomeduds can not give authorization to that
> > distros to distribute their packages (something like Linus does not bother
> > about binary-only kernel modules, even that it violates gpl).
>
> If the packages are distributed under the GPL (in some public way - say
> on an FTP site), then they have no way of doing that. If the distributor
> (say Caldera) respects the GPL (i.e: supplies the source and lets you
> re-distribute the packages themselves) then there's nothing that can
> legally been done about GPL software being a part of a proprietary
> licensed software. The only think the GPL restricts is linking against
> non-GPL compatible code.
>
> Linus Torvalds can allow proprietary modules for the Linux kernel, but
> someone can fork the codebase, and then decide notto allow that.
> Proprietary modules are allowed due to a general consensos among the
> kernel developers.
There is one difference between the two packages:
KDE and gnome are distributed under the gnu (L?)GPL. Anybody can
redistribute blablabla etc.
The linux kernel is licensed under a license that is not exactly the GPL.
It is the GPL with an extra clause that allows binary modules (to allow
support of certain kinds of hardware, and with certain limitations, but
this is really *not* the place to discuss them).
TurboLinux, Caldera and SuSE (I don't know about Connectiva) redistribute
GPLed software, BUT...
They also bundle this software with their own installers (that probably do
a pretty good job, otherwise people woldn't have bought them). The whole
distribution is not published under the GPL or any similar license.
So legally all they have to make sure is that all of their packages (or at
least, the GPLed and LGPLed ones), including the source, are publicly
available from their FTP site (they actually could get away with less,but
there are practical reason for that)
Don't like this? choose a different distro. Mandrake, Redhat and Debian,
for instance, are distros that are completely free (installer and
packageing under the GPL or something very similar).
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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