On 2013-02-10 00:39, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 11:58:06PM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
> 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.
Fair point, but in this particular case, GCC could have been
bootstrapped to the point of being self-hosted with glibc, and at that
point there would be no confusion. Right?
--
/c