On Sunday 26 October 2003 22:23, Eran Tromer wrote: > I must insist, however, that the definition of "derivative work", though > indeed external to the GPL, is far from trivial in our case. Moreover, > the GPL further muddies the water in its Section 2 paragraph 5 (not > paragraph 4 as I said earlier; that was an off-by-one): > > ------- > These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If > identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and > can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in > themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those > sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you > distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on > the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this > License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire > whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. > -------
Don't bite me, just my 2 bits common sense: The way I always read this paragraph (and everything else about the GPL) is summarized by this - your work must be GPLed if you distribute your work as a single whole and it contains a GPLed component (don't bother with the linking argument - its irrelevant). one way to go around that is to distribute the non-GPLed parts as a single standalone whole and the GPLed parts as optional additions (run-time additions is best, but compile time could also work if its safe to assume that the user is expected to compile the product anyway). see two paragraphs below the one qouted - "mere aggregation". This only works if your work functions as a standalone and is usable to whatever reasonable purpose w/o the GPLed components. The last one is a bit hazy and I copied it from someone (don't remmeber who) but IMO is what will count at the end of the day (in court) - if you sell a huge financial software that can only be used to play mine-sweeper w/o the GPLed componenets, then its a no-go. more so, if your software does everything by itself but it needs the GPLed components to save the work done, the I'd say that you still need to GPL it as it is not usable w/o the GPLed components. All that said and done, I'd iterate something that was said at the start of the discussion but I think its too important to be left there - all this applys to the GPL alone - other licenses (for example - the LGPL) have completly different regulations and considerations. you must make sure that you are talking about the GPL, as often I found that people assume a certain piece of software is covered by the GPL w/o actually bothering to check. you may find out that it is instead covered by the BSD or some other more leniant licesnsing terms. -- Oded ::.. Generally, there are very few technical problems. There are, however, an abundance of political, social, and economic problems. ================================================================= 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]
