Le Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 03:15:19PM -0500, Steve Langasek écrivait: > 2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion > of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and > distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 > above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: > > [...] > > b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in > whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any > part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third > parties under the terms of this License.
I'm sorry but a perl script using DBI/DBD::mysql doesn't contain DBD::mysql and is not derived from DBD::mysql ... and it doesn't contain libmysqlclient12 and it isn't derived from libmysqlclient12. This is even more clear when you consider the fact that a perl script can use "DBI" as a general DB layer without knowing which driver is used behind the doors. > Please let me know if you find problems with any of my reasoning above. The fact is that I think that you extend too easily the meaning of "contains" and "is derived". While a program directly linked can be considered like a derived work of the library, I don't think that you can say that program A is a derived work of libX if A is linked to libY which itself uses libX. Yes this means that you can go around the limitation of the GPL... but I'm confident that a fake library used only in that intent would be considered as violating the spirit of the GPL. However when that intermediate library serves a generic purpose like DBI, I doubt that we violate the spirit of the GPL. > Since the GPL makes no reference to technical details of linking > mechanisms, however, I'm confident that any interpretation that permits > distributing GPL-incompatible perl scripts together with a GPL perl > module would also permit distributing GPL-incompatible compiled binaries > together with GPL libraries. Note that the perl module is not GPL only, but GPL/Artistic (like most perl modules). I don't know how much trouble that brings ... :-) Does your reasoning also mean that each time a proprietary perl script is using a standard perl module, it uses the module under the terms of the Artistic license and not under the GPL because it can't comply with the GPL ? It's so boring those license issues ... Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://www.ouaza.com Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com
