Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 19 Dec 1998 16:37:51 -0800 (PST) | From | George Bonser <> | Subject | Re: Article: IBM wants to "clean up the license" of Linux |
| |
On Sat, 19 Dec 1998, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> Naming aside, my point is that open source software is always, well, > open -- open to be picked up and carried by new interested parties. > Even more, the GPL subset of the open source pool can't spawn private > forks; this is even stronger insurance. > > So I don't worry about corporate interference. Not yet, anyway.
Yes, I think that according to the GPL, any change that IBM makes in existing code would have to be also GPL. Now if they write their own separate piece, say a module, I think they can use any license they want. OSS does not distribute the source for their commercial sound stuff, do they?
QUESTION: Say IBM wrote their own mmap.c replacement with no GPL code in it. Can they distribute a binary kernel image made with that mmap.c without distributing the source to that small program? I mean, can that particular mmap.c have a non-gpl license? In other words, they distribute only the source for the GPL parts of the code?
George Bonser
The Linux "We're never going out of business" sale at an FTP site near you!
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |