On Dec 18, 2006, "David Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It makes no difference whether the "mere aggregation" paragraph kicks in > because the "mere aggregation" paragraph is *explaining* the *law*. What > matters is what the law actually *says*. You mean "mere aggregation" is defined in copyright law? I don't think so, otherwise the term 'aggregate' probably wouldn't have been used in GPLv3. AFAIK it's perfectly legitimate (even if immoral) for a copyright license to prohibit the distribution of the software governed by the license with anything else the author establishes. E.g., some Java virtual machine's license used to establish that you couldn't ship it along with other implementations of Java that didn't pass some comformance test. Now, the GPL doesn't do this. It doesn't say you can't distribute GPLed software along with any other software. It only says that, when you distribute together works that don't constitute mere aggregation (providing its own definition of mere aggregation), then the whole must be licensed under the GPL. > The GPL could say that if you ever see the source code to a GPL'd work, > every work you ever write must be placed under the GPL. But that wouldn't > make it true, because that would be a requirement outside the GPL's scope. It is indeed possible that this would fall outside the scope of copyright law in the US, and it would not be morally acceptable for the GPL to impose such a condition. But then, since nobody can be forced to see the source code of a GPLed work, or any work for that matter, acceptance is voluntary, and one shouldn't enter an agreement one's not willing to abide by. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED], gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist [EMAIL PROTECTED], gnu.org} - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
