What effect does including another open-source utility in your source repository

Question

What effect does including another open-source utility in your source repository have upon your code if they use different licenses?

I tend to use more permissive licenses such as the Apache and MIT.

To allow others to use a project with as little setup as possible I want to include utilities used by the build scripts in the repository (documentation generator, JavaScript minifier, etc).

I understand that things generated by these utilities (documentation, minified JS files) are notderivative works.

What is not as clear to me is the question of whether including some utilities which have more restrictive licenses will create conflicts with my code?

Does the "viral" nature of the GPL threaten to "infect" my code by including GPL utilities in my repository and referencing them from my build scripts?

None of the code will be intermingled, appropriate licenses will remain with each item. I should mostly just be using binaries from the outside sources (.jar, etc). I just want to make sure that "distributing" them in my repository when I upload it to GitHub won't taint everything else.

Explanation / Answer

If you include a GPL tool with your project, then you're distributing that tool, which means that you're supposed to provide the source. If it's something that's commonly available, then I doubt that anybody will care - but if you want to make absolutely sure that everything is kosher, you might want to make the sources available (separately from your main project, since most people won't need them).

If you've made any modifications to the GPL tool, then you must make the source available - but I think you knew that already.

As far as "tainting", that won't be a problem. The fact that two pieces of software are distributed together is irrelevant - what matters is how they fit together. For example, the Apple developer kit contains GCC, GNU make, and a bunch of other GPL tools, along with closed-source tools. And that's perfectly legal.

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