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

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 20:30 UTC (Sun) by dmantione (guest, #4640)
In reply to: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses by k8to
Parent article: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

No, of course not. If others haven't contributed source code including
Makefiles, they cannot claims those Makefiles are part of their source
code and enforce the GPL.

You guys are reading the GPL as "it is forbidden to distribute without
(GPL'ed) Makefiles", but it says "any Makefile is part of the source
code" which is there to prevent people circumventing the GPL by removing
all Makefiles from it.

But it is not really worth it to have a flame war over this as I don't
question that Schilling is playing games with the GPL... The guy hates
Linux and likes Solaris and is trying power tricks. I only fear that he
very well knows what he is doing :(

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cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 21:39 UTC (Sun) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

My comments apply whether or not the Makefiles are part of the source. Where do you see that being mentioned in the quite simple argument?

The GPL says that it is forbidden to distribute without a similarly avilable build system.

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 14, 2006 13:42 UTC (Mon) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

"The GPL says that it is forbidden to distribute without a similarly avilable build system.".

Which GPL, and which clause? I've just read GPL-2 in its entirety and could find no such clause or anything similar.

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 14, 2006 15:57 UTC (Mon) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

Section 3 of GPL v2 contains the requirement that you must make the source code available for binaries that you distribute, and says that "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable."

It doesn't matter whether or not the "scripts used to control compilation" are a derived work of somebody else's code or not. What matters is if the built executable is a derived work of that code. If so, then you need the copyright holders' permission to distribute the executable. If the only permission they've given you is the GPL'd code, then they've told you "fine, you can distribute compiled binaries derived from this, but only if you also distribute your makefiles." And they're perfectly within their rights to do that.