Re: Distribution of GNU tools with commercial packages

[Alexandre Oliva <oliva at lsd dot ic dot unicamp dot br>]

On Jan 11, 2000, Leo Romanoff <romix@geocities.com> wrote:

> Will be this integrating of the remote debugging support for our
> controller considered as the changing of gdb sources?

As Mike said, yes.

> Because a communication protocol is very good place for undesirable
> accesses into the embedded systems, it is very important for our
> customers to keep secret the protocol and the sources of the remote
> procedures.

The GPL does not require you to make the sources public.  It just
requires that whoever gets the binaries has access to the sources too.
So you could provide the sources only to those that, as you say,
consider it important that the protocol remains secret.

Of course, the GPL allows them to re-distribute the sources as they
see fit, but, if it is really important for them to keep the protocol
secret, they probably won't do it.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Bra[sz]il
oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br,guarana.{org,com}} aoliva@{acm,computer}.org
oliva@{gnu.org,kaffe.org,{egcs,sourceware}.cygnus.com,samba.org}
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