distribution: how much is enough?

[Seth David Schoen]

Signal 11 writes:

> Quick question -
> 
> I'm going to be releasing a program under GPL soon,
> and all the libraries I use are LGPL/GPL.  My 
> question is - how much of the original distribution
> do I have to include besides the necessary bits I need
> to get my program to compile?  Is it safe to just
> grab the files I need, and put a note in the readme
> file with a location to get the full source for
> each library if they want it?
> 
> I think the GPL/LGPL lets you do this.. but parts of
> it were somewhat vague. :\

There's never any obligation under the FSF's licenses to redistribute
anything.  Combining an excerpt of something with your own code is
still a kind of derived work, which is subject to the same rules
about derived works as any other.

After all, if you _add_ something to my GPLed package, you're not
obliged to distribute my original package as a condition of distributing
your new version.  If you were, every free software FTP site would have
to carry every historical version of every package.

You could use some data structures implementation that had been created
as part of GNOME in your own program, without distributing GNOME at all,
as long as you put your program under the GPL.

-- 
                    Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>
      They said look at the light we're giving you,  /  And the darkness
      that we're saving you from.   -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown"
  http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/  (personal)  http://www.loyalty.org/  (CAF)