grow up :-/

grow up :-/

Posted May 16, 2006 17:20 UTC (Tue) by Arker (guest, #14205)
In reply to: grow up :-/ by gvy
Parent article: GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

"The drivers are fine to ship."

Have you really thought this through?

You can ship a binary blob on the same cd with GPL software. You can choose to link that blob into the software, and run it and use it yourself. That's within your rights.

But, you *can't* turn around and redistribute that once you do. You can only redistribute the GPL part if you can give folks the source to the whole thing, and if part of it is a binary blob, you can't give the source to that, so you can't ship it.

So the key question here is which is actually happening. It's my understanding, and I've seen no reason to think otherwise, that in terms of a live CD it's not an option to simply package the blob and compile instructions - it all needs to be compiled and ready to run for the live cd concept to work. And if that's the case, it sure looks like a legal problem to me. I wouldn't touch it without a law firm behind me.

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