That is not necessarily the part I was thinking of - I had indeed made some confusion between what the GPL says and what the LGPL and other exceptions-to-the-GPL licenses say.
I have detailed this more in another post, but basically my argument is that the very existence of the LGPL makes sense only if we take the GPL's definition of derived works to include programs which dynamically link with the GPL work (and this is indeed what e.g. Stallman believes).
There are also some similar exemptions in the GPL license for GCC, to make sure that the binary resulting from compiling a program with GCC does not have to be distributed under GCC's license terms even if it might be a derived work of GCC itself (e.g. when the compiler includes bits of code that it does consider copyrighted, such as replacing calls to the library function memcpy with an optimized version that is defined in GCC's source code).
I absolutely agree with you that, when distributing a combined work including GPL code very directly (say, a CD with Linux + some proprietary software), the GPL may well impose extra restrictions even on parts that are not considered derived works under copyright law. You are free to not accept those extra restrictions, but then you have no right to distribute the GPL works at all (though you can still distribute the parts that are not derived works independently).
I have detailed this more in another post, but basically my argument is that the very existence of the LGPL makes sense only if we take the GPL's definition of derived works to include programs which dynamically link with the GPL work (and this is indeed what e.g. Stallman believes).
There are also some similar exemptions in the GPL license for GCC, to make sure that the binary resulting from compiling a program with GCC does not have to be distributed under GCC's license terms even if it might be a derived work of GCC itself (e.g. when the compiler includes bits of code that it does consider copyrighted, such as replacing calls to the library function memcpy with an optimized version that is defined in GCC's source code).
I absolutely agree with you that, when distributing a combined work including GPL code very directly (say, a CD with Linux + some proprietary software), the GPL may well impose extra restrictions even on parts that are not considered derived works under copyright law. You are free to not accept those extra restrictions, but then you have no right to distribute the GPL works at all (though you can still distribute the parts that are not derived works independently).