On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 08:05:43PM +0200, Gregor Hoffleit wrote:
On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 01:12:20PM -0400, Jim Penny wrote:
It appears to me, that, if you want to play it safe, you would not distribute the code under license G and license T on the same medium. It is certainly acceptable to call code released under license G from code released under license T; but it is not clear that you can do subclassing and such.
I think this is wrong. Providing things on the same media is "mere aggregation" and therefore not a problem on its own.
BTW, I was responding to a question implicit in the original message, but not explicitly asked. The question is "How do I minimize risk of inadvertant 'GPL Contamination'?". In this view, if you never distribute GPL and non-GPL code on the same medium, you have made a small step in making sure that they are considered as separate entities. After all, one of the more ambiguous part of the GPL is what is "mere aggregation" and what is a "combined work". It is somewhat easier to consider something a combined work if it is always distributed with GPL code. Jim
It's not acceptable, though, to distribute a proprietary program that has to be linked with a GPL component by the customer--even if you distribute this on separate medias!
If you're interested in this, feel free to come over to debian-legal and read the ongoing discussion.
Gregor