> No, it says that the work as a whole must be licensed [to ... ] under > the >>TERMS<< of the gpl. > > The rights granted in the GPL have to be available to everyone, but > if another license grants those terms that's fine. > > Then again, this distinction might not matter to you.
hm. now that i check i see that you are right. my mistake. > I guess you're thinking of binary kernel modules for linux? But > that is a special dispensation granted by Linus, and isn't a right > granted by the gpl. actually i hadn't heard of that; i was talking about a purely hypothetical situation where some not nice person (tm) wants to take a gpl'ed work and release proprietary modifications. this doesn't require any special dispensations; you just have to release the modifications separately. and as far as i can tell that involves either (a) giving the source to the original and doing something like patch between the compiled original and your modified binary; (b) distributing the differences in separate .o files so the user can link it in; or (c) releasing source. since (a) and (b) are really very inconvenient, this not nice person (tm) would have to accept the less savory (to him) option of releasing source. > You mean like the FreeBSD vs. the NetBSD camps? for one; or if you or were to take some code under npl or qpl and modify it, and want to release your modifications under gpl. this requires that you do something odd with diffs: you'd have to distribute an .orig.tar.gz under the original license, and a .diff.tar.gz under the license you'd prefer. now the obvious solution is to just put the diffs under the original license but what if they were themselves derived from a different gpl'ed work? (or what if you just -wanted- to put them under another license. there are valid reasons for a person to prefer one license over another, even if most of the world couldn't care less. is it right to inconvenience them? possibly, if the alternative is worse to more people; i'm suggesting that it would be easy to make them happy without hurting anyone, though.) > Anyways, I think you're tilting at windmills. There's more useful > problems to solve. you're probably right. i never said this was an important subject. ;) --p. The reader this signature encounters not failing to understand is cursed.
