Sounds like co-distribution is perfectly legal

Sounds like co-distribution is perfectly legal

Posted Nov 11, 2005 4:46 UTC (Fri) by kimoto (subscriber, #5244)
In reply to: Sounds like co-distribution is perfectly legal by vonbrand
Parent article: Debian and Nexenta collide

One rationale from Thomas Bushnell for why the funny wording is in the GPL2 (which was designed in the age of proprietary systems):

The special exception allows you to ship, for example, emacs binaries linked against the proprietary HPUX libraries, provided HP distributes those libraries along with the major components of HPUX (that is, they cannot have unbundled them), and provided you are not shipping those libraries yourself. This is specifically designed to prevent HP from including an emacs binary which is linked against their libraries, shipping the whole thing as part of HPUX, and not providing the source for their libraries.

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