[Discuss] OSS licenses (was Home NAS redux)

[Edward Ned Harvey (blu)]

> Media boundaries, as well as file boundaries, are meaningless.  In fact, they
> are one and the same.

Gawd, I can't believe there's still MORE to say about this.  Beating a dead horse, about the total complete insignificance of file and media boundaries.

Now how about if I store something in Amazon S3.  They don't provide a filesystem; just an abstracted serial data store accessible through an API.  So if I write a GPL binary there, and follow it with a non-GPL binary, I haven't combined them into a file.  If I tell you to download blocks A, I've only distributed the GPL product, not the other product.  If I tell you to download blocks B, I've only distributed the other product, not the GPL product.  But if I tell you to download blocks A and B, then have I combined those things into a single derived work?  

What if I merely tell you, "Block A is the GPL product, and Block B is the non-GPL product."  And I leave the decision up to you, to choose if you're going to download neither, one or the other, or both.

What if I tell you, "The URL for a GPL product is ___ and the URL for a non-GPL product is ____"