On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 11:22:40PM +0200, Joost Kooij wrote: > Now please tell me if I'm wrong about this as well: > > The implication of the facts considered here is, that it would in general > not be allowed to distribute gpl'ed software, when it was built with > a compiler that does not provide the sources of its runtime libraries > under a gpl-tolerant license.
And this is exactly why there is a convoluted exception in the GPL for the "major components of the operating system" :) It's there to allow, say, Emacs to be compiled for Solaris. > If this argument is not completely nonsensical, should we not ask the > free software foundation, if this is really what they meant? I think the FSF wrote this exception to cover the common cases. Their goal is an entirely free system, and compatibility with non-free platforms is an add-on feature. (It was also needed for bootstrapping the project, of course, but that's no longer the case.) So I think they are not likely to care much about corner cases. The "major components" clause is probably enough for the utilities that come with FreeDOS, but not for the kernel. If the kernel really has only 200 bytes of Borland code in it, then perhaps that could be gotten rid of fairly easily. -- Richard Braakman Will write free software for money. See http://www.xs4all.nl/~dark/resume.html
