Re: Market pressures for more reliable software

[Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>]

Al Christians wrote:

> Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
>>Since the
>>military requires the sources anyway, and refuses to give out the 
>>software in most cases, they are quite compatabile with the GPL. 
>>
> 
> That's a curious one.  GPL says:
> 
> "If ... conditions are imposed on you ... that contradict the conditions
> of this License, they do       not excuse you from the conditions of
> this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously
> your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations,
> then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all." 
> 
> This would appear to make it impossible, for example for a military
> contractor that 'distributes' its products to military customers to
> include GPL code in a weapons system that was under security
> restrictions, or for one country to license military technology
> that included GPL code to another country with any restrictions on 
> to whom the weapons could be re-sold.  And is hurling a projectile 
> that contains embedded software 'redistribution'?
> 
> 
> Al
> 

The owner of the copyright has all necessary rights to do whatever he 
feels like with it.  GPL is one manifestation of this, and explicitly 
allows one to release it under other licenses.

OTOH, if you mean that including GPL code written by others would be a 
problem, only those who are have a legitimate binary copy  have the 
right to require source code, and the only person/company obligated to 
supply them with the source code is the person/company that they got the 
binary from.

The only time this becomes at all questionable is when military equiment 
is decomissioned.  In that case they might be required to either remove 
the binary code or to distribute the source.  OTOH, I believe that the 
current understanding is that having an embedded module that contains 
binary code is not the same as having the source code unless it contains 
some method for dumping the code.  But I'm less than certain about that.

-- 
Charles Hixson

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