I also don't think that it can be argued that a library has to be on all
distributions in order for it to be acceptable: historically many
commercial UNIX vendors didn't (maybe still do not, but I no longer care
since I haven't used one in quite some time) include the development
environment in their standard distribution. They had the run-time parts,
but not the link-time C library, for example.
This is actually a simple and straightforward issue. The reason the
GNU GPL permits linking with these libraries is explicit in the wording.
Here are the words:
the source code distributed need not include
anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the
operating system on which the executable runs,
In all of these cases, that I have heard of, the C library for these
proprietary systems is distributed either with the kernel or with the
C compiler. Either way, these words explicitly permit linking with
that library.
In GPL version 1, this text said "with the operating system", and as a
result, it did not handle the case where the compiler and the C
library are distributed as a separate package from the kernel. Unix
systems which did not come with C compilers began to appear around
that time, so I changed these words in GPL version 2.
Someone else wrote:
I don't buy the "so in general it's not" weaseling, because that declares
SuSE to somehow "not be a normal Linux distribution".
Whether SuSE (or any other specific GNU/Linux distribution) is a
normal one is not the question. The question is what is normal
practice for distributing the kernel, the compiler, and other major
components of the system--not directly about any particular system
distribution. In other words, not "Is SuSE normal?" but rather, "Is
including Qt with Linux normal? Is including Qt with GCC normal?"
I do hope that SuSE's practice of including non-free software in a
system distribution will not become normal. After working so hard to
give people the chance to be free, I would be sad to see them throw it
away for a little convenience. So I hope people will not use, install
or recommend SuSE. But that is another issue.
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