cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 22:03 UTC (Sun) by HenrikH (guest, #31152)
In reply to: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses by dmantione
Parent article: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

But still the whole source is put under the GPL and since there is no added clause that sais that the makefile requirement is void, the requirement is still there in the license.

If you send a patch under the GPL to this project without having written a makefile for your patch in question changes nothing since you still only give the distributor the rights to distribute your patch if he follows the GPL requirements (that is including the makefiles used to build the binary), if the distributer chooses not to include the makefiles in a GPL compatible way, then he has no rights to distribute your patch and he has to remove it from the source in order to be able to distribute the binary!

You still seam to think that this has something to do with the "viral"-propery of the GPL, but as others already has pointed out on several occasions there is nothing here that makes the makefiles automatically become GPLed.

Instead the thing is that the only thing that is allowing you to distribute the cdrtools binary is the GPL, and since the GPL requires you to also distribute the makefiles used to build the binary you have to do so or lose the rights to distribute the binary.

If you somehow can manage to build the cdrtools binary without the makefiles then you are of course free to distribute the resulting binary without the makefiles since you didn't use them in order to build it.

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