Path: utzoo!telly!ddsw1!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!enea!kuling!christer
From: christer@emil.CSD.UU.SE (Christer Johansson)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: More confusion on GNU copying conditions
Summary: Send them as object code not executables.
Message-ID: <902@kuling.UUCP>
Date: 24 Nov 88 20:38:09 GMT
References: <8811131422.AA00325@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu> 
	    <10602@s.ms.uky.edu> 
	    <17353@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
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Reply-To: christer@aida.CSD.UU.SE (Christer Johansson)
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Distribution: gnu
Organization: Dept. of Computing Science, Uppsala University
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In-reply-to: mellon@eris.berkeley.edu (Ted Lemon)
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In article <17353@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> of 22 Nov 88 07:53:10 GMT,
mellon@eris (Ted Lemon) writes:
>In article <10602@s.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron) writes:
>> by the existing copyright laws I have the
>>rights to publish/not publish *my* code as I wish.  You guys have the
>>rights to publish/not publish *your* code as you wish.  It cannot be
>>legal for you guys to be able to restrict what I do with *my* code.

>You're quite right that the FSF
>has no legal recourse to control your distribution of your code.   However,
>the FSF does have the right to control the distribution if its code.
>The GNU license prohibits you from distributing GNU code linked together
>with your code without making available your source code as well as the
>GNU source code.

I guess FSF, having the copyright, can decide exactly under what circumstances
I may use their code. It could be if I pay them lots of $$$. It could be if I
accept to distribute their code to anyone asking it of me. It could be if I
distribute all code I'm ever going to write with source to anyone asking it of
me.

What I wonder is: would it be legal to distribute the gnu products with source,
and the unlinked .o files, compiled with gcc, of my code under the current
license agreement?

I think it would be since the Gnu Cc General Public License (my copy's
clarified 11 Feb 1988) says that "the whole of any work that you distribute or
publish, that in whole or in part contains or is a derivative of GNU CC or any
part thereof," has to be licensed on the same terms as gcc. Object files
compiled with gcc are neither derived from nor containing the compiler or the
libraries.

	--Christer Johansson