On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Rick Moen <[email protected]> wrote: > > Anyway, as I just got through saying to Ben Tilly: (1) People > can and do perform pretty much whatever screwball actions they wish to > perform with their own property. (2) You should take care to understand > all of the implications of any licence you use, because somebody else > definitely may, and you'll look really silly acting surprised.
Sure. But these are not always clear. For example, suppose I start selling a binary-only table engine for MySQL which offers real benefits over Innodb. Let's say less bloat, less maintenance, faster performance, and no issues with thread deadlocks when multi-row inserts are done. Suppose this is dynamically linked and I ship with an installer that detects installed MySQL versions and installs against this. The installer asks for a license key which is used to determine how many client access licenses you have purchased. I sell CAL's for $50/client. Suppose furthermore that I only ship this in to customers in the US so we can limit this discussion to US copyright law. Do I even need Oracle's permission to release my project? My money would be on "no" and so the GPL really would have no implication. After all, *all* have done is use an API owned by Oracle (my money would also be that they'd sue me to try to win anyway, see Google v. Oracle). Allowed? Not allowed? Only talking about what the *law* requires in this case. There may be other ways of pressuring certain behaviors other than court. But only talking about US law here. European law may be different. But I think that the current case law and statute strongly suggests that this would be allowed without any copyright license from Oracle at least in the US. I think that Oracle would lose as a matter of law and that you can't use copyright to restrict linking as a technical matter. Static linking would be arguably different *only* because one is distributing a compiled work containing a component of someone else's and therefore a copyright license would be required (providing a module which is statically linked only during install would not pose this problem though). But if Lexmark v. Static Control settled anything it's that you can't use copyright to control secondary markets for practical goods. Best Wishes, Chris Travers _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
