Rex Dieter wrote:
They own VNC. It's theirs to license how they see fit, and theirs to distribute how they see fit. In fact I beleive technically only the source they provide really is GPL'd. Even if the binaries are produced from those sources, they could be provided under any other license.Kyle McDonald wrote:
Rex Dieter wrote:
RealVNC is violating the GPL (unknowningly or not) by failing to
provide the (preferred) source to the binary they distribute.
On top of that, it's trechnically impossible for Real-VNC to violate the
GPL.
I suggest you read the GPL then (relavent section 3 appended). It says that
GPL binaries that are distributed *must* include source. I can't see how
Real-VNC doesn't have to comply with that.
This is a special case though. You dont' see it mostly in the Open Source world.
But it does occur. The copyright holder retains all rights to the code they release under GPL. They are free to do anything they want with it, including makeing changes that they don't release unde GPL.
The GPL doesn't say the source has to be included in the same file the binaries are in. It actually offers several ways to distribute the sources. And RealVNC complies with this by making the sources available as a tar file.
But as I wrote above, they could just as easily decalse the binaries they release as being released under some new binary-only license. It's all up to them. They own the code.
-Kyle
-- Rex
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