On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 10:46:35AM +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > >The only thing a court may need to decide is if linking a library > >makes your software a derived work. As I said before, this case > >looks clear enough to most people that even infringing companies > >prefer to release code and not go to court when they get caught.
> Merely linking with a library does not make your software derived work > of that company! How can that be? What if all your software does is add a "main()" to a 100,000 lines of code in the library? by the provisions of the GPL, linking your code with a GPL'd library makes your code a derived work. Quoting the GPL FAQ: Q: If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any program which uses it has to be under the GPL? A: Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library. > Let's take an example. Suppose Wine is distributed under the GPL (It's > LGPL, but for the sake of discussion). No no no, that's exactly the difference between the GPL and the LGPL! > According to your logic, any > program that is built to link against Wine is a derivative work of Wine, > and therefor must be under the GPL. Correct. >This is patently absured. Why is it absurd? speaking as a hypothetical WINE developer, if you want to use my hard work (link against wine) you have to contribute something in return - make your code GPL. > Most of > the programs that link with Wine never heard of Wine in their entire > life. They were built to link with Win32 API, expecting Microsoft's > version of it. How can a software that never knew about my program be > considered derivative work of it? Do they require a reompilation to link with wine, or is it dynamic linking in the dlopen() sense? In any case, it is obvious that the program is using my work (as a hypothetical wine programmer) and thus can be considered a derived work of mine. I certainly agree with you that in this case, the onus of making the code open does not lie with its developers (who have no knowledge of and have never used WINE), but rather with the user who did use WINE, which is a thorny mess I have no idea how to solve ;-) > For that reason, I'm not sure that the QT GPL license indeed means what > some people think it means. I'm pretty sure that's what QT's people > expected it to mean, but that still does not mean this is, indeed, the > case. In any case, I think the Wine example clearly shows that the mere > act of dynamic linking does not yet make a program derived work. The FSF FAQ is one hundred percent clear on this subject. See quote above. It is also as close as you can get to authoriative until a court rules on what exactly the GPL means. Cheers, Muli -- Muli Ben-Yehuda http://www.mulix.org | http://mulix.livejournal.com/ "the nucleus of linux oscillates my world" - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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