[copyleft-next] HBR cure for 2013-02-03

"Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)" copyleft-next at clacke.user.lysator.liu.se
Sun Feb 10 02:20:04 UTC 2013


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


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