Shlomi Fish wrote:
On Monday 09 May 2005 15:23, Amit Aronovitch wrote:Remember, I did say "unless you drop the main benefit". I was not referring to the distribution medium.
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.
Read "supply" above as "package a version configured to act as integral part of your system" - otherwise your'e no different than the download sites mentioned by Amos (at least not enough to make it a good startup idea).
How well can you *integrate* (main benefit - right?) software packages from diverse sources if your'e banned from some ways of 'combining' some packages with certain others?
Your'e certainly not allowed to link propriatery main against GPL'ed libs.
( Other way around is a borderline case - probably author of the GPL'ed main must explicitly agree to have his prog use this and that lib).
Consider basic services (multimedia format handling, GUI toolkits, central configuration mechanisms etc.) - you must have seperate libraries for your GPL and non-GPL stuff. Would it be easy to keep a consistant look & feel?
Hmm...
Now that I start thinking of details, it seems that it's not such a big deal after all - when you consider this class of "basic" libs, many of them are LGPL or other non-GPL license anyway. Plus - at least the major propriatary services can pass under the "major components of the OS" exception.
Plus - all three points I listed to demonstrate the benefits of package integration can be easily implemented without any GPL infringement.
OK, OK - the last phrase of my previous post was major BS after all. I just didn't think it through - feel free to call me names whenever I do that again :-) .
So - erase that last sentence - free software won't be a problem. It's the propriatary licensed stuff that would be the downfall of this hypothetical "windows distro" startup. Microsoft might be able to pull this off (in fact they ARE doing it - their own way...), but I doubt any smaller entity - let alone a startup - could get close.
By the way, if you make your distro stick with free software - your'e out of 'original idea for startup' land again.
There's the well-known cygwin, and - since wev'e been mentioning Debian alot - there's even the
"Debian GNU/W32" project
http://debian-cygwin.sourceforge.net/ .
(Of course, if you consider the original topic of this thread - I'd say if you consider installing a complete debian userspace on windows - why not go all the way and get a Linux kernel too? Very few windows users would list the *kernel* as the reason for sticking with this platform)
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.
Right. That's clearly "mere aggregation" - it's explicitly allowed.
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.
Ditto.
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