about an unwritten loop-hole where a GPL or LGPL violation can continue to
be distributed for an unspecified amount of time by being reclassified as
being an intermediate package.
Nothing in the GPL, whether written or "unwritten", makes any
exception for "intermediate" packages. All distribution of all
versions must follow the GPL.
However, the GPL is enforced by copyright holders, and they might find
it reasonable to forgive a violation if the perpetrator agrees to
bring it to an end reasonably quickly. For instance, I saw no point
in threatening to sue Tripwire if they were going make their program
free in short order and thus comply permanently. If it drags on,
that's a different issue.
As part of this road tour, Corel handed
out demostration Corel LinuxOS Open Distribution CD-ROMs. Unlike the box
set, these CDs and nothing supplied with them provided a written offer for
the GPL packages they just provided in binary only format.
I thought that Corel had abandoned these plans in September. Since
then I have heard nothing about it. Would you please give me more
details of this activity? What is the name of the product? Can you
tell me the names of some FSF-copyrighted programs that are included?
be able to wave the requirements indefinately using practices which are
accepted commonly by Linux friendly companies.
I don't attach any special importance to whether a company has a
friendly attitude towards the kernel in some sense. I'm more
concerned with how a company treats the free software community and
our freedom--which, in the instance of Corel, is not very well.
But no company is entitled to decide to pick and choose which parts of
the GPL to follow. We will have to take action, once we get details
to base action on.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jun 26 2000 - 21:00:05 EST