On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 08:39:39PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
It is mere aggregation since the other parts do not contain or derive
from any software licensed under the GPL. If I licensed my software
under say MIT X11 license then there is simply no way another license
can automatically relicense my software under any different license.
That simply does not work under copyright law. You can however produce a
derivative work if both components are under compatible licenses. The
act of putting distinct packages in the same srpm creates no such
derivative work. See if you can find any relatively well known sources
agreeing with you. IMO this is not a gray area that requires any court
case to clarify.
Ok. I don't remember where I saw that, or if I just imagined it myself.
Rahul
PS: We really really should not be playing lawyers here. If you have a
actual case that would affect Fedora and there is no general consensus
we can ask the real lawyers. Otherwise do take this discussion off
fedora-devel.
In my opinion this is for fedora-devel, since it impacts on reviews.
I have repeatedly annoyed submitters by saying that a src.rpm as a whole
was a derived work of each of the tarballs. Now I stand corrected.
Similarly I have argued that all the files in a tarball needed to be
GPL compatible if there was a single GPL file in the tarball, this seems
to be wrong too, if the 2 files don't have any relationship at link time
and no runtime inclusion (say a C program and a script).
--
Pat