On 02/04/2013 23:28, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
On 04/03/2013 12:01 AM, Anthonys Lists wrote:
But as I understand it, the lawsuit as actually sued said "apis are copyright"
and you would have needed a licence to use the apis - to use Oracle's Java.
That's exactly in line with what David said. Google were providing a clean-room
re-implementation -- the only thing it had in common with Oracle's Java was the
API.
Oracle couldn't sue on the basis of code duplication, so they tried to stop
Google distributing their implementation by claiming copyright violation on the
basis of duplication of the API. And (rightly) lost.
That's a different situation from the one we have been discussing here, which is
code that _uses_ (not implements) functions whose only existing implementation
is in a GPL-licensed program.
Think of the API as a looking glass. On one side you have the code that
IMPLEMENTS the api. On the other side we have the code that CALLS the api.
Correct - Oracle wanted to stop Google writing new code to IMPLEMENT the
api (that's what David said).
BUT - iirc what Oracle actually sued over was "using the looking glass".
Which would have stopped people writing code that CALLS the api (that's
what I said).
And that IS exactly the situation we have with lilypond. Using an api -
in either direction - is not copyrightable. So if your lilypond text
file calls a GPL lilypond function, it is not subject to the GPL because
the api cannot be copyrighted. (If you copy the function
*implementation* into your file, of course you then do get caught by
copyright.)
Cheers,
Wol
_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
lilypond-user@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
