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.