rms@VENUS.BERKELEY.EDU (Richard Stallman) (03/04/88)
The latest versions of GNU Emacs and GDB, and the next version of GCC, have a changed version of the General Public License. The changes consist of a clarification and some relaxations: * You can distribute GNU software and proprietary software on the same tape or disk. (This was always intended to be permitted, but some people weren't sure from the old wording.) * If you distribute binaries without sources, your written offer to distribute the corresponding sources at a later date now needs to be valid only for three years. * If you receive binaries without sources, and you redistribute the binaries noncommercially, you don't have to pass on a copy of the written offer to get sources; it's enough to pass on the information of who made the offer. So you can redistribute the binaries electronically without paper. * You can distribute an executable linked with system libraries even if you can't distribute the source for those system libraries. (Everyone is already doing this, and it seems like a reasonable thing to do.) Please see the actual document if you want more details. Sometimes people ask us for permission to copy the GNU copying terms for software they are writing. They ask because they see that the COPYING file is copyrighted. Please go ahead and do it. As far as we are concerned, the more people who use these terms or similar terms, the better. The reason for copyrighting the COPYING file is because we don't want people modifying it and making altered versions that purport to be the copying terms *for GNU software*.