On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 11:30:31AM +1100, Don Sanders wrote: > Personally I think that it is theoretically possible to license a binary under > the GPL, but I don't think it make much sense to do so, (it's equivalent to > applying the GPL to say a file of raw binary data of rainfall measurements).
You're not legally allowed to distribute a binary without a license. > For instance Section 0 of the GPL requires that in order to apply the GPL to a > work that work must contain a notice saying it may be "distributed under the > terms of this General Public License". > > I would assume in source code form this would be done by the use of comments. > However the act of compilation would strip out the comments leaving no such > notice in the binaries. > > Now on this system > $strings grep | grep -i General > $strings grep | grep -i GPL > $strings grep | grep -i GNU > GNU e?grep, version 1.6 > $ > > (I also did a strings grep | more just to be sure). > > Thus I conclude that the binary for GNU grep contains no such notice and is > not > licensed under the GPL. (The source code is a different matter entirely). The way debian solves this is by not distributing GNU grep alone, but as a part of a larger work (the grep package) which includes the copyright notice. Doesn't seem like much of a problem to me. -- Raul
