[cc-community] GNU-GPL, makefiles, and non-distributed executables

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Fri Dec 14 21:26:58 EST 2007


> The GPL is quite openly expressed in this regard:
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic

I think you missed the issue. Alice doesn't distribute a derivative
of George's work, and therefore does not trigger the source code
requirement.

Alice sells a CD that contains an aggregation of works, not a
derivative. The CD includes George's source code, a compiler,
a linker, a make file. The CD also includes an object file of
Alice's portion of her application.

Eve buys the CD, and runs the makefile on her computer locally,
compiling George's source code into an object file, then linking
Alice's object with George's object, creating the final executable.

The final executable is not distributed from Alice to Eve.
The final executable is created by Eve, using an aggregation
of works given to her by Alice.

Since the final executable is not distributed,
the source code requirement is not triggered,
and Alice is not required to supply source code
for her portion of the application.

Either that, or I'm getting confused with some stuff
about LGPL and incorrectly munging it over to GPL.

Greg





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