"Mere aggregation" is there for a reason. [LWN.net]

"Mere aggregation" is there for a reason.

Posted Dec 1, 2010 14:01 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: "Mere aggregation" is there for a reason. by khim
Parent article: The kernel and the C library as a single project

> > These are not considered to be derived works of the kernel and so they don't have to take the kernel's license into account.

> If they are distributed separately? Sure. When they are combined to form bigger, larger, work like Android or Ubuntu? No.

You are right but *in the case of the GPL* it does not make much difference since the GPL does not care about mere aggregation.

> It's like when Alice hates Bob's guts (they had messy divorce or something)

The GPL is all love!

> First part is simple: of course Android and Ubuntu are derived works! They quite literally include millions of bytes of code from kernel!

Ubuntu has no licence but a large *collection* of them, so I really doubt such an example will help make anything clearer.

Otherwise nice post, thanks.

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"Mere aggregation" is there for a reason.

Posted Dec 2, 2010 18:25 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

There must be a license (i.e., a permission to do something you normally aren't allowed to do) on the collection as such, else you can't redistribute it either... Red Hat (the collection) used to go under GPL, I suppose Fedora does the same (plus trademark restrictions). Ubuntu does restrict (via trademark) what derivative can (and can't) be called Ubuntu.

"Mere aggregation" is there for a reason.

Posted Dec 2, 2010 18:52 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

It is possible to claim copyright on a compilation (== "collection"), yes. But I am not aware of any requirement to do so. If there is no additional license/copyright on the compilation as a whole, then redistribution is only limited by the terms of the individual items within the collection.

In fact you can only claim additional copyright on the collection if your preparation of the compiled materials involves sufficient additional work to constitute "an original work of authorship" in its own right. Just stuffing a bunch of existing packages on a disk would be unlikely to merit a new copyright as a compilation. Preparing a full linux distro's worth of packages selected and possibly modified for interoperability, together with meta-information, installation scripts, yadda, yadda, is clearly a different story.