🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <F6m0eB8w164w@mantis.co.uk>
mathew@mantis.co.uk (Lieutenant 030) writes:
> Hypothetical scenario:
[procedure deleted, essentially a clean-room approach to porting,
 distributing the ported Emacs as diffs to GNU source]
> I now have a port of Emacs to a new architecture.  I can sell it and
> prohibit redistribution.  

No, you can't.  See Section 2.b) of the GNU General Public License:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of
it, and copy and distribute such modifications under the terms of
Paragraph 1 above, provided that you also do the following:

    a) [...]

    b) cause the whole of any work that you distribute or publish,
    that in whole or in part contains the Program or any part thereof,
    either with or without modifications, to be licensed at no charge
    to all third parties under the terms of this General Public
    License (except that you may choose to grant warranty protection
    to some or all third parties, at your option).
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Your hypothetical clean-room procedure doesn't get you around the GPL,
because the final product is a derivative of GNU Emacs -- indeed, it
is simply GNU Emacs, ported to a new architecture.  You said so
yourself.  And the GPL says the whole thing has to be
freely-redistributable.  Case closed.

-- Dan
--
Daniel F. Boyd -- consp04@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu
====
It's not a system called 'X-Windows', it's a window system named 'X'.
WordPerfect 5.1: The MULTICS of word processors.