On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 22:12:56 +0000, Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [snip] > Some of those python scripts may be derivatives of GNU readline. Most > are probably not. Those that are must be licensed under the GPL. The > rest do not have to be. All this interpreter crud in between is > *irrelevant*. If the same program written in C would be a derivative > then it's still a derivative even when you insert an interpreter in > the middle.
I agree completely with Andrew here. I also think that "linking crud" is every bit as irrelevant as "interpreter crud". Plagiarize the expressive content of code, you've created a derivative work. Hence, when I ripped out the internals of a GPL RSA implementation that used a bignum library that turned out to be non-free, replacing every line of the code with implementation against a different (free) bignum, the result was infringing not because it had the same API (that's functional, and hence not protectable under copyright) but because I retained not just the ideas but the style and flow of the original. (It's released as GPL, of course.) But a separate work using that implementation, whether bound to an interpreted OCaml interface, the same OCaml interface compiled to bytecode or native code, a dynamically linked C interface, a statically linked C interface, or a hypothetical template-based C++ interface that flows everything together in the preprocessing stage, just isn't a derivative work under copyright law. Cheers, - Michael
