On Tue Mar 03 11:07, Joerg Schilling wrote: > The rules of the GPL end at "work" limit and neither libc nor > libschily or libscg are part of the "work" mkisofs. For this reason, > there is no problem with the fact that mkisofs links against libschily > and libscg.
The FSF certainly believes (and I think it is supported by at least US copyright law) that the complete work of mkisofs linked against libschily and libscg (i.e. the binary form, rather than the source) is a single work which is a derivative work of all three individual (source) works. Therefore, it must be distributed under terms which are compatible with the licences of all three. You may disagree with this stance, however, it is a view which Debian holds. Maybe that's just us being too cautious, but we are by nature cautious and that isn't going to change. We do a lot of work and distribution in the US. You may also think that it _is_ possible to distribute under terms which satisfy both the CDDL and GPL. There is certainly enough doubt about this that again, we are being conservative in our interpretations. Finally, to address your other point that the above view would make the whole of Debian undistributable: this is where both the system libraries clause comes in (which libscg doesn't meet) and also the fact that libc is LGPL and the kernel is GPLv2+exception come in. Anyway, Debian is not obliged to distribute your software. We have deliberately conservative interpretations of copyright law and licences which is unlikely to change. If you want us to distribute it you'll have to do so under a licence we're happy with. This wouldn't be the first time we've disagreed with people about the freeness of a licence... Matt. -- Matthew Johnson
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