Misunderstanding GPL's terms and conditions as restrictions

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Tue Jul 29 07:27:41 UTC 2008


On Jul 29, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> No, RSAREF couldn't have been modified.  It had restricted
> distribution and everyone had to get their own copy.

http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/browse_thread/thread/ecc4d4ff360019e/b3dbb6f89144b706?lnk=st&q=gnu.misc.discuss+ripem#b3dbb6f89144b706

http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/crypt/cryptography/rpem/ripem/
http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/crypt/cryptography/rpem/ripem/README
http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/crypt/cryptography/rpem/ripem/rsaref/


There is indeed a lot of conflicting information out there, and the
files above are older than the discussion, but the point stands that
some piece of software could only be distributed under the GPL, and by
people who had accepted a patent license that prevented them from
doing just that, regardless of any copyright license
incompatibilities.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}




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