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Yes, you do. From memory there's one get-out: if there are non-GPL products which would be drop-in replacements for the user, the GPL isn't contagious.
by regularfry 15y ago
Yes, you do. From memory there's one get-out: if there are non-GPL products which would be drop-in replacements for the user, the GPL isn't contagious.
- tzs 15y agoNot quite. What you are probably remembering is this (or something derived from this). 1. Someone wrote a program. It needed to use an arbitrary precision math library, and it needed to use a freely distributable but closed source library. 2. This program was distributed in source form. In the source code there were #ifdefs to allow it to be built to use either of the two most common arbitrary precision math libraries. One of these was under a BSD license and one was under GPL. 3. Many systems did not have either math library preinstalled, so someone who wanted to build this program on those would have to go download whichever math library they decided to use. 4. Stallman claimed that distributing the program induced people to download the math libraries, and since one of the libraries was GPL, the program was inducing distribution of GPL code, and so itself must be placed under GPL. 5. The author of the program wrote a new math library that was just a wrapper for the BSD library, but that provided the same interface as the GPL library. Now people who chose to build the program with the build option to use the GPL library could successfully build by using this new non-GPL library. Since the source code no longer contained a build option that necessarily induced those electing it to go and download GPL code, Stallman was satisfied.