Re: [Fsfe-uk] Licensing and aggregate works

[Robin Green]

This really is NOT the place for helping people with their
proprietary software issues. Please, no-one answer him.
It's simply off-topic, quite apart from anything else.

On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 12:25:35AM +0000, Roger Leigh wrote:
> I'd appreciate any comments anyone might have on the following:
> 
> If I have a proprietary program, I can't legally take some GPL package
> and distribute both together in the same .tar.gz, since this would
> make them an "aggregate work".  However, distributing them on a CD is
> OK.
> 
> I'm interested in where exactly the line is drawn.  If I can
> distribute on CD, it also looks like a raw CD image is OK, too.
> However, this is just a single big file, so how can this be treated
> any differently from a tarfile or zipfile?  Is including the tarfiles
> together in a bigger tarfile allowed?
> 
> 
> My problem is this: my company wishes to distribute a proprietary
> application.  For the GNU/Linux version, this isn't an issue: we can
> simply distribute it as a (set of) .debs, perhaps along with the rest
> of Debian on a custom CD.  However, for the Windows version, it looks
> like the kitchen sink needs to be included: an absolute ton of
> libraries, GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU groff, GNU ghostscript, Perl,
> PostgreSQL and libraries, maybe done as a cygwin install.
> 
> This is going to be a major pain for the end user if they are required
> to install 40 separate packages before being able to install our
> program.  What's the best approach to take without violating any
> licence?  If they only needed to run one installer, it wouldn't matter
> if there were separate distribution files for each bit, but is this
> strictly necessary?
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Roger
> (wishing there was a dpkg for win32--why oh why is it so rubbish?!)
> 
> -- 
> Roger Leigh
> 
>                 Printing on GNU/Linux?  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
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> mail.
> 
> 
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-- 
Robin

Comment found in leaked MS code, in private\ntos\w32\ntuser\client\nt6\user.h:
"* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national 
debt."

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