... as long as those terms clearly permit all the
activities that this License permits
I am (thankfully) not a lawyer. I don't speak for Sun. YMMV...
Assume I have a software program that consists of some parts that are
"mine" and other parts that are "yours". Furthermore, assume that you
have only given me the right to redistribute your stuff in binary form.
Under these terms, I can not license the resulting program under the
GPL because I am unable to grant "the GPL-allowed" permissions for your
parts of the program.
It also follows that nobody else (other than you) can do so either.
The implication of this is that, without your permission, *nobody* can
combine our program with GPL'd stuff to make a derivative work, because
the result would be required to be licensed under the GPL, and your
parts of the program *can't* be.
RMS's very public position is that he wants to use the "desirable GPL'd
stuff" as a lever to force all the "you's" in the world to license their
code under the GPL. He sees it as a feature that people in "my"
situation are precluded from benefiting from other GPL'd code: If I
"want it" bad enough, then I'll find a way to force you to license your
stuff under the GPL, or I will reimplement it myself or I will find a
way to do without it. Until then, I am not welcome in RMS's sandbox.
It is this "all or nothing" requirement that makes it difficult for
complex IP systems like Solaris to "go GNU", and why there is so much
hope about GPLv3...
No copyright holder is ever forced to license under the GPL.
I'd rephrase this assertion as:
No copyright holder is ever explicitly forced to license under
the GPL, though the intent of the GPL is to apply market pressure
to convince all such software hoarders to do so over time.
-John
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