On Saturday 28 June 2008, Daniel Iliev wrote: > It seems to me that you are obliged to publish cdrtools under the GNU > GPL until cdrtools contains at least one piece of work which is > licensed under the GNU GPL. Actually that is what the GNU GPL is all > about - to force you to keep the source of a given project open if > you had used any GPLd work for that project.
To understand how to use the GPL it is necessary to understand what it was designed to do: Create an entire body of free code that can never be made un-free. That entire body is GNU. RMS says so in one of his many essays and faqs on the subject[1]. The original intent is obviously for people who want to contribute to GNU - they must license their code for GNU under GPL, and their code then becomes a coherent part of something much larger. Picking and choosing bits of code here and there is liable to get one in trouble with incompatible licenses, as this is not the original intent. > How can this be achieved? Simply the GPL applies itself to the whole > system if even the smallest part of the system was licenced under it. Yes, that is a side effect. But I don't think the intent was to infect other code with GPL due to the presence of GPL'ed code, as GNU was started to replace existing proprietary Unixes. More like new GPL code is added to the GNU that already exists. Stunningly obvious conclusion: Don't mix and match GPL code with other code (except BSD where this problem doesn't arise) -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- [email protected] mailing list
