>Believe me, the GPL has been written many year ago, and a huge amount of >people have been involved with it since then and scrutinized it in every neat >details, and there are little doubt left about those issues.
Yet you seem to be very confused: >To direct you to the GPL FAQ for more detail : > > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem > You cannot incorporate GPL-covered software in a proprietary system. The >goal of the GPL is to grant everyone the freedom to copy, redistribute, >understand, and modify a program. If you could incorporate GPL-covered >software into a non-free system, it would have the effect of making the >GPL-covered software non-free too. > > A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version of >that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program must be >released under the GPL if it is released at all. This is for two reasons: to >make sure that users who get the software get the freedom they should have, >and to encourage people to give back improvements that they make. ... as you seem to ignore: > However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software >alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that >the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not >combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program. > The difference between this and "incorporating" the GPL-covered software >is partly a matter of substance and partly form. The substantive part is this: >if the two programs are combined so that they become effectively two parts of >one program, then you can't treat them as two separate programs. So the GPL >has to cover the whole thing. > > If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the >kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two separate >programs--but you have to do it properly. The issue is simply one of form: how >you describe what you are doing. Why do we care about this? Because we want to >make sure the users clearly understand the free status of the GPL-covered >software in the collection. > > If people were to distribute GPL-covered software calling it "part of" a >system that users know is partly proprietary, users might be uncertain of >their rights regarding the GPL-covered software. But if they know that what >they have received is a free program plus another program, side by side, their >rights will be clear. To treat the "kernel" and the "compiler" as well separated and the "a shared system library" and a "program" as not well separated shows a basic lack of understanding of how operating systems work. (In practice, in Solaris the system libraries and the kernel are one and indivisible; the only documented and well-defined system boundary is the shared library ABI) Casper _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
