On Monday 09 May 2005 15:23, Amit Aronovitch wrote:
> If your'e Micorosft, you might create a central distribution source
> carrying Windows, Office, several games and tools, but what about
> Photoshop? Doom3? Acrobat Reader? WinZip? You can't legally distribute
> those without special contract with the authors (well, you can always
> buy some companies, and put others out of business ;-) ).
> Of course, you could add some Free Software in your distribution too -
> but you can't add GPL-licensed stuff (and GPL is the most common OSS
> license). If you do add GPL stuff, you'll have to make all the other
> stuff open source too - so the commercial parts are out - you can't
> supply Office & Windows.
>
That's bullshit. Microsoft (for example) can distribute updates to GPLed
software along with their own proprietary software without any restriction
whatsoever. As long as the GPLed components install to different files,
there's no restrictions whatsoever on the distribution medium of GPLed
software. On my hard disk I have Opera[1] which is proprietary along with gcc
which is GPLed. If I make a tarball out of both, would it make Opera GPLed?
Or am I breaking the law? Of course not.
Do you want to say that Debian is breaking the law by supplying updates to
GPLed program from the same medium as Open Source Software (which may not
necessarily be Free according to the FSD), under a non-compatible license?
Hell no.
The only restriction Microsoft have is that they supply the sources to the
GPLed program on demand or on their web-site. (or at least point someone to
where they can find them IANAL). That and if they make modifications to their
sources, they must distribute these modifications or the modified sources.
Whether Microsoft indeed want to supply updates to GPLed and other software
that is free as in speech from its updates source is a different question.
But if they do decide to, it will be fully legal.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
[1] - Just so everybody relax, it's not one of my default browsers. I just use
it to check HTML sites I create so I can be more sure I'm doing things right.
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