On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 11:58:06PM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
Essentially, there's something strange about the system library exception. It's focused on clarifying that you don't have to provide source code to something you probably won't have distributable (or GPL-compatible) source code to anyway, but it doesn't say how the inclusion of the system library in the generated binary affects the requirement to license the binary under the GPL.
The larger issue I was getting at is this: If you distribute a binary, and you provide everything needed to generate a functionally equivalent binary, why does the license of the original binary even matter? The answer might be that the GPL is designed to ensure that binaries are easily redistributable under GPL-like terms (royalty-free copying and distribution), without expecting the user to have to rebuild from source code in order to have a freely-redistributable binary.
Consider if you will the case of Cygnus Support distributing gcc binaries for Solaris. Sun stopped shipping a compiler with their OS, so you couldn't build gcc from source unless you paid them $$$ for suncc, or if you obtained a bootstrap gcc binary from somewhere. But if the gcc binary was linked against the Solaris C library, which was most definitively _not_ licensed under a GPLv2 compatible license, the GPL would need to have some provision where it would be legal to distribute said gcc binary to the Solaris user.
- Ted