On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 07:47 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > As the rest of the sentence continues to say "then this License, and its > terms, do not apply to those sections" I think you are one being > misleading here. There is some room for disagreement on the > separateness but not about whether aggregations are permitted when those > specified conditions are met. > > Here's the whole thing in context since you seem to be incapable of > finding it in the thousands of COPYING files you must have: > > "If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, > and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in > themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those > sections when you distribute them as separate works." That part is a simple statement of copyright law. as a prelude to what comes next. As it says, the GPL doesn't even _apply_ to those parts when you distribute them separately. How could it? The GPL only operates by giving you back permissions which copyright law took from you -- and the GPL _cannot_ apply to those parts, when you distribute them as separate works. But you seem to have 'accidentally' cut out the next sentence of the same paragraph: "...as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it." Or are you trying to make the incredible claim that in fact, the firmware embedded somewhere in a bzImage file -- where we can't even find it to extract it -- _is_ being distributed as a separate work, rather than as a part of a whole which is based on the kernel? If so, you would have to be _very_ deluded. That's almost as silly as the 'but we _like_ to use hex editors on our kernel, so we _are_ providing it in the preferred form for modification' defence. :) -- dwmw2 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list