> On the flip side, if you sell a virtual appliance that includes the GNU userspace (GPL) and some proprietary binaries, is that considered distribution "as par

> On the flip side, if you sell a virtual appliance that includes the GNU userspace (GPL) and some proprietary binaries, is that considered distribution "as part of a whole" (the appliance), and are you obligated to make your code available under the GPL? Even though there's no linking involved, it's not clear to me whether your code can be "reasonably considered independent and separate" if it's only distributed as part of the appliance. There is already legal precedent separating software licenses at process boundaries. This is why every piece of software in a Linux distribution doesn't need to be GPL'ed.