I'm thinking of licensing a program under the GPL, but I dislike the FSF's overly restrictive concept that 'dynamic linking is modification'.
I want my program (and any derivative works) to be allowed to use *accurately documented and published* interfaces to proprietary (or any other) libraries or programs. Dynamic linking should be allowed in this situation, as should RPC, pipes, etc. etc. (The interface should allow for free implementations of it, although they don't need to actually exist at the time. Its documentation doesn't need to be written by anyone in particular; it could have been reverse-engineered, even.) I *don't* want to allow a derivative of my program to be linked with a proprietary program through secret, undocumented, or unpublished interfaces. Is there a good licence to put on my program which will clearly allow exactly this? Can it be done with GPL-plus-exceptions? This is the line I would draw regarding RPC vs. linking, etc. It also renders the OS exception unnecessary. I suspect other people may agree with me on this line, so it might be a generally useful piece of information. I hope the well-informed people on the debian-legal list might be able to help me with this point... --Nathanael [EMAIL PROTECTED]
