Re: foremost legality (GPL vs Public Domain)

[Michel Alexandre Salim <michel salim gmail com>]

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 21:40 -0500, Patrick Barnes wrote:
> To start, IANAL.
> 
> Generally speaking, a program as a whole is not what is licensed, it is
> the code.  You can combine code under assorted licenses, but the
> resulting product is limited to the most restrictive possible subset of
> those licensing terms.  In the case of public domain and GPL, the GPL is
> the more restrictive license.  The public domain code remains public
> domain.  The GPL code remains GPL'd.  The resulting program can be
> released as open-source, and the terms of the GPL must be abided by for
> the GPL'd code.  If someone were to remove the GPL'd code, they could
> then do as they please with the public domain code.  The public domain
> is GPL-compatible.  IANAL, but I believe you can safely package the
> program for inclusion in Extras.
> 
Would this be analogous to the GPL requirement that the recipient of a
binary package be able to get the source code?

In this case, user of the GPL package would have the right to request
the original, public-domain-only code. Either the GPL package points to
the original package in its documentation, or the SRPM be packaged as
the original tarball + a recursive diff with the GPL'ed tree?

- Michel