cdrtools - a tale of two licenses [LWN.net]

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 9:33 UTC (Sun) by ajf (subscriber, #10844)
In reply to: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses by dmantione
Parent article: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Where have "the Debian people" (which people?) claimed that the Makefiles are under the GPL? If I understood the discussion correctly, the claim is that Schilling is failing to comply with the requirements of the GPL by including Makefiles which aren't compatible with the GPL. They could hardly claim that if they believed, as you seem to be suggesting, the Makefiles already are GPL.

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cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 10:11 UTC (Sun) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

You are right, I should rewrite the sentence in question to "However, the
Debian people are trying to prove the Makefile has to be GPL by reading
the GPL."

The rest doesn't matter, because: If a work does not contain Makefiles,
you are not required to redistribute any Makefiles with the binaries.
However, if the work does contain them, the GPL requires people
distributing binaries to distribute them with the source.

So, you must again proof the Makefiles are part of the GPL work, of which
the only relevant document is the German copyright law.

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 12:05 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

If a work does not contain Makefiles, you are not required to redistribute any Makefiles with the binaries.

Sure. You are not required to distribute anything. You must offer GPL-compatible Makefiles upon request.

It does not matter if Makefiles are separate work or not. What does matter is GPL requirement: you must offer build-system on GPL-compatible terms.

But I don't wanna! It's my build system, it's my scripts! I can do anything I want with them!

Sure - but then you are losing your permission to distribute GPL-licensed body of the problem so you can not distribute any binaries. You surely can distribute your makefiles and files you hold copyright to on any terms you want - but you can not distribute other peoples work unless you agree to distribute Makefiles with GPL-compatible license. You've lost the permission, end of story.