Re: On interpreting licences (was: KDE not in Debian?)
Around 1989, NeXT wanted to release the Objective C front end as just
object files, and tell the user to link them with GCC. Since this
would clearly be against the goal of the GPL, I asked our lawyer
whether we had grounds to object. He said that what NeXT proposed to
do would be tantamount to distributing a larger program which contains
GCC, and therefore would violate the GPL. I conveyed this to NeXT,
and they released the Objective C front end as free software.
An executable in which the GPL-covered code is linked as a shared
library or dynamically linked is an even stronger case. The point is
that the users are being told to run the non-free code in combination
with the GPL-covered code.
If, on the other hand, two programs don't need to be linked together
and are distributed for use separately, and a user decides on his own
initiative to link them together and run them, the GPL permits that
because the combination is in no sense being distributed.
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