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A collective work is separate from a derived work. These are two separate things in copyright law. You can own the copyright over a library of music, despite not owning the copyright over the actual music itself. So, you could have a proprietary Linux distribution that is only made up of GPL'd software. The only thing that would be "proprietary" is the particular configuration, selection and build scripts of the packages that you picked.

So, having a GPL'd distribution means that the package sources and configurations and other such "distribution sources" have to follow the rules of the GPL. It doesn't matter what the license of the software itself is (it can even be GPL-incompatible or proprietary).




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