[Fsfe-uk] Licensing and aggregate works

[Roger Leigh]

I'd appreciate any comments anyone might have on the following:

If I have a proprietary program, I can't legally take some GPL package
and distribute both together in the same .tar.gz, since this would
make them an "aggregate work".  However, distributing them on a CD is
OK.

I'm interested in where exactly the line is drawn.  If I can
distribute on CD, it also looks like a raw CD image is OK, too.
However, this is just a single big file, so how can this be treated
any differently from a tarfile or zipfile?  Is including the tarfiles
together in a bigger tarfile allowed?


My problem is this: my company wishes to distribute a proprietary
application.  For the GNU/Linux version, this isn't an issue: we can
simply distribute it as a (set of) .debs, perhaps along with the rest
of Debian on a custom CD.  However, for the Windows version, it looks
like the kitchen sink needs to be included: an absolute ton of
libraries, GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU groff, GNU ghostscript, Perl,
PostgreSQL and libraries, maybe done as a cygwin install.

This is going to be a major pain for the end user if they are required
to install 40 separate packages before being able to install our
program.  What's the best approach to take without violating any
licence?  If they only needed to run one installer, it wouldn't matter
if there were separate distribution files for each bit, but is this
strictly necessary?


Thanks,
Roger
(wishing there was a dpkg for win32--why oh why is it so rubbish?!)

-- 
Roger Leigh

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