Free software and public administrations?

[Alessandro Rubini]

> True, but anyway there are laws that make such algoriths secret.

Ok (although not something I'd agree with). The what they can't do is
linking such stuff to GPL stuff.  Neither a GPL kernel nor LGPL
libraries nor GPL tools are any problem here.  What's the problem?

It doesn't look to me that they want to include other people's code in
their own application. If this is true, they must get agreement (and
probably pay for that).  But it looks like they have their own
applications, and they can remain as they are. It is not a valid
excuse to refuse a GPL compiler or an LGPL standard library.

They are even allowed to popen() a gzip program from their application
or find or grep or perl or whatever GPL code exists, _much_ more than
any proprietary environment offers -- assuming the environment is
completely proprietary, with no gzip nor perl, but since they are
against Free Software they can't be already using such tools.

/alessandro