A little GPL riddle (was: GPL as an evaluation license)

A little GPL riddle (was: GPL as an evaluation license)

Aviad Mandel aviad.mandel at gmail.com
Mon Apr 11 00:33:05 IDT 2011


For the sake of fairness, I'll say that the questions I had about my own
little venture are answered, thank you all.

But for pure curiosity, I'm left wondering how effective GPL really is.

Let's leave the microwave for a second, and think about a proprietary web
software browser, for a desktop, using a lot of GPLed code, and should
remain closed source.

The trick is like this: The installation program generates the executables
by compiling the GPLed sources (Gentoo style) and linking them with the
proprietary object code. What you get is a binary nobody is allowed to copy,
but it's already on the hard disk ready for running.

Don't tell me not to do this. I'm not going to. But can anyone tell why this
would be illegal? Where's the moment something illegal happens?

And please, I know that the mixed binary is derived work and must be
distributed further under the same license. But the thing is that nobody
really wants to distribute it, so what's the problem?
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