On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 08:16:40PM +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote: > 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.
Actually, MS did distribute GPLed software. NT Resource kit contained perl. IIRC with sources. I don't know if recent RKits continue this tradition. -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
