Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 17, 2006 08:47 PM
If you consider your argument to be correct, people in a completely proprietary world are free to not use proprietary software, too. You see, they are free. Then, what do we need the FSF and Richard Stallman for?
Absolutely. Black-and-white logic with respect to freedom is false logic. Even if group A has freedom, group B may still have more freedom or different types of freedom.
It also restricts somebody else who likes to release his own work under a different license, if his software needs GPL'ed software to be installed -- a dependency is no derivation!
Garbage. Dependencies are only a problem if you bundle them up into your work. For example, if I want to distribute software that requires certain additional libraries, I don't have to bundle those libraries. I only have to include the source for them if I include the binaries as part of my product.
The same applies more generally. You can even sell a closed-source Linux modification if you want to. You just have to keep your work completely and cleanly separated from everyone elses. Packaging your work in the form of an patch that can modify a separately obtained copy of linux would do the job, so long as that patch really didn't include anyone elses work. Similar tricks are done routinely with community 'mods' to commercial closed-source games.
You can license your work any way you want to. You just can't change the license on other peoples work.
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Re:Sorry, but that's not true.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 17, 2006 08:47 PMAbsolutely. Black-and-white logic with respect to freedom is false logic. Even if group A has freedom, group B may still have more freedom or different types of freedom.
Garbage. Dependencies are only a problem if you bundle them up into your work. For example, if I want to distribute software that requires certain additional libraries, I don't have to bundle those libraries. I only have to include the source for them if I include the binaries as part of my product.
The same applies more generally. You can even sell a closed-source Linux modification if you want to. You just have to keep your work completely and cleanly separated from everyone elses. Packaging your work in the form of an patch that can modify a separately obtained copy of linux would do the job, so long as that patch really didn't include anyone elses work. Similar tricks are done routinely with community 'mods' to commercial closed-source games.
You can license your work any way you want to. You just can't change the license on other peoples work.
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