🚀 go-pugleaf

Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com> writes:

> David Damerell <damerell@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> 
> > Craig Brozefsky  <craig@red-bean.com> wrote:
> > >David Damerell <damerell@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> > >>Let us imagine that there is some GPLed code in Windoze. That would
> > >>require all of Windoze to be made available under the GPL, which would be
> > >>very amusing for IBM, Sun, Corel, DEC/Compaq, Apple, the FSF,
> > >>AOL/Netscape/Time Warner/Genom Corporation, etc. I suspect there
> > >>would be no shortage of lawyer money to fight that one with...
> > >Or they could take that GPLed code out of the distribution.
> > 
> > They'd still have violated the copyright of the authors of the GPLed code
> > with the earlier versions (implying that money could be extracted); and
> > they'd have quite the problem if they suddenly had to stop distributing
> > all existing versions of Windows, wouldn't they?
> 
> Your original assertion is that it would require all of Windoze to be
> made available under the GPL.  I was only pointing out that that is not
> necesarry and not likely.  I was not implying that there would be no
> damages granted at all.

I trust you're aware of section 2 of the GPL and the subsequent paragraph?
It depends very much on which bits of Windoze are hypothetically in
violation of the GPL - you can surely say that notepad.exe would be one
'work' and write.exe another, for example, in which case one would need to
be GPL'd in entirety but not the other. OTOH if it's something fundamental
like a bit of kernel32.dll... maybe it *is* all screwy.
(Not as though I've seen any GPL'd programs as bad as either "editor" above
;)

~Tim
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