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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!hpg30a.csc.cuhk.hk!hkusuc.hku.hk!news.cs.hku.hk!ipc09!kkto From: kkto@csd.hku.hk (To Kar Keung Isaac) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.advocacy,comp.unix.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs FreeBSD Followup-To: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.advocacy,comp.unix.misc Date: 13 Dec 1995 04:49:35 GMT Organization: Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong Lines: 30 Message-ID: <4alm0v$77q@ns.cs.hku.hk> References: <489kuu$rbo@pelican.cs.ucla.edu> <DJ3DM7.n0L@kroete2.freinet.de> <4a1s2i$4l9@zuul.nmti.com> <DJ6y7H.MIE@kroete2.freinet.de> <4a6fgo$6lg@agate.berkeley.edu> <4a7d9p$860@muirwood.convex.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ipc09.cs.hku.hk X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:30086 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:10294 comp.unix.advocacy:12094 comp.unix.misc:20044 Larry Daffner (ldaffner@convex.com) wrote: > at all. There are 3 main points to the GPL. This is far too misleading. First that what's a "derivative" is not defined. Second that the idea binary-only, no source distribution is possible is not correct. You should check the libc or libg++ copying notice. Actually there're two type of GPL. The ordinary GPL deal with most programs. The library GPL covers the software library that you might want to add to it. If you would like to use a library and gcc to compile your commercial program, but you don't want GPL, then you can well distribute your software to be a library or object file, and ask the user to link them together themselves. Then you can just tell the user where to get the required library together with yours. Or, if you do not like the idea to ask dumb users to link the library themselves, you can distribute the executable file to your user, but you have to tell your users that the program use the library and the compiler (e.g., gcc and libc), and give them the option to get the library themselves. You also have to allow users to reverse engineer your code and debug the part that contains error due to the problems of the free libraries. So, not all derived work of free software are free. But yes---most of them do. -- Isaac To MPhil, Computer Science Mail: mailto:kkto@cs.hku.hk URL: http://www.cs.hku.hk/~kkto