[physicsguy]

> You can defensively set shipped binaries as fallbacks in the event the application is running on a newer system that dropped critical functionality

Not if they're GPL licensed you can't. And that's a headache most commercial people do not want at all when trying to write software that's often for a marginal part of their audience anyway.

[tadfisher]

Show me the part of the GPL which forbids you from shipping compiled binaries.

[jlokier]

> Not if they're GPL licensed you can't.

Wrong, misleading and possibly FUD. Yes you can ship GPL licensed software with your application, even a proprietary, closed source application.

You have to comply with the GPL terms, but that's easy to do for every library or auxiliary program that you'd link to or call in a Linux distro.

The GPL is designed to support this use case, with it's "mere aggregation" clause making it clear that it's allowed.

The one thing you can't do if you're shipping a closed source application is link to GPL-licensed code (unless there's an special exception clause, or it's LGPL, or it's dual-licensed to allow this). But for this type of GPL library, you can't use the Linux distro's shipped version either. So the GPL constraint makes no difference to the question of whether you can ship a frozen or fallback version with your application in lieu of the distro version.

If there's a corner case the above doesn't cover, I'm not aware of it and I've studied GPL compliance more thoroughly than most people. So I'd like to know about it :-)