It's not the exception...

It's not the exception...

Posted Mar 24, 2011 7:00 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: I'm not so sure... by foom
Parent article: Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

I don't think that's the case; can you point out the clause of the GCC Runtime Library Exception that you think restricts distribution on the same medium?

It's not the exception. It's GPL v2, again. The same problem: However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.. Independent GPLv2-only program is safe. But if you include GPLv2-only program and GCC on a single medium - you are violating GPLv2 (often, but not always: while libstdc++ is included in most C++ programs and indeed is complex and copyrightable libgcc is much simpler and on some platforms like x86 it does not put anything copyrightable in С program). I'll not play Microsoft Florian and claim it immediately spells "the end of the world": it's not enough to violate someone's copyright. That someone must sue your first or at least claim it's offended. And if he can easily decide that in reality he's not offended and actually wants to permit such redistribution (like MySQL did), but it's genuine license violation and so is landmine...

P.S. In reality it's not 100% true: in some countries it is possible to sue someone even if the copyright owner is not objecting and even win the case, we are talking about sane jurisdictions here.

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