On Fri, Feb 11, 2000 at 05:26:47PM +0100, Marc van Leeuwen wrote: > Nobody in this "discussion" is claiming (as far as I can see) that > by some subtle shuffling of pieces you can get a (composite) program > from A to B without requiring permissions from all copyright owners.
It seems to me that that's exactly what people are saying when they claim that it's legal to distribute kghostscript. > The point is that the complex conditions in the licences, in partcular > GPL, may lead to a situation where such permission may be obtained for > some particular method of distribution, but not for some other method. > For instance, you may distribute in source form (and under GPL) a > GPL-ed an application that links to Qt (because then there is no > requirement to distribute "complete sources"), while also distributing > Qt (in source and binary) under QPL; the recipient could compile and > link an executable program which does not "happen to spring into > existence", and which was the goal of distributing the GPL sources, > yet which could not have been legally distributed directly. Certainly: it's only if you distribute executables or object code that there's any requirement to distribute the complete source for the program. > I think you put forward yourself another example (a Solaris-linked > GPL binary and Solaris itself), where the components might be legally > distributed separately (assuming permission from Sun) but not > together. Right: that was an example of a situation which takes advantage of the special exception in section 3 of the GPL. > So please don't suggest any more that people are trying to evade > copyright law when in fact they are trying (maybe by jumping through > hoops) to abide by the conditions put forth in the licence(s). Are you now claiming that it's legal to distribute kghostscript? -- Raul
