On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 12:38:51PM +0100, Marc van Leeuwen wrote: > I maintain that unless the distribution of dynamically linked binaries > itself is considered a copyright infringement, there's no vicarious > liability either. And to come back to the static/dynamic distinction: > an obvious and relevant difference with distribution of statically > linked binaries is that the user can execute those without also having > the library object file.
Ok, let's pretend for a minute that distributing kghostscript is legal. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it should be legal to make trivial changes to the source and redistribute. For example, adding -static to the CFLAGS in the makefile and redistributing should be perfectly legal. You've granted this right under the GPL. Now, let's say that I take this modified version of the sources for kghostscript and decide to chop out some of Qt, add in some code in from the Gimp, and in the process wind up creating a Qt variant where any display element will renders postscript. Imagine that, after a couple years of development, the resulting widget set is extracted out of the program and achieves great popularity. So Troll decided to exercise their rights, takes a copy of that widget set, cleans it up, and sells it under their professional license. Would you agree that each of these steps would be legal as a consequence of kghostscript being licensed under the GPL? Would you agree that this would be legal as a consequence of kghostscript being licensed under Qt? If not, why not? [By the way, I'm not trying to predict the future here -- feel free to treat "kghostscript", "Gimp" and "postscript" as metasyntactic variables.] -- Raul
