[sf-lug] Potential GPL violation, with the potential intent to victimize our Elderly loved ones

[Jesse Zbikowski]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Chris Mason
<mason.christopher.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
> The non-free "Eldy" software is a central selling point of the system,
> making it clearly a derived work - meaning that, under the terms of
> the GNU GPL, the end result itself must be licensed under the GPL.

Bundling free with non-free software is referred to as "mere
aggregation" in GPL2 and specifically permitted. You may want to read
Linus Torvald's email on this topic:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/16/202

It is OK for non-free software to depend on and connect to free
software... however if they are so tightly connected as to form a
single program, as in the combination of a kernel with modules, then
the resulting single program is a derived work. To me, the borderline
between two separate interacting programs and a single combined
program is somewhat blurry and I suspect this will be further tested
as software methodology evolves.