> Oron Peled wrote: > >>>Its yet to stand up in court though. >>>
> Merely linking with a library does not make your software derived work > of that company! How can that be? > > Let's take an example. Suppose Wine is distributed under the GPL (It's > LGPL, but for the sake of discussion). 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. This is patently absured. 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? As I've said before, I think this is all about intent: did the software developer intended to include the GPLed code as an important part of the functionality of the software ? if so then its a derivative work. else its not. IANAL but the from the little I know about how courts work, I believe this is the direction a court ruling - if ever one would be needed - will take. According to this distinction, using wine to run Win32 programs does not make these programs derivative works of wine, while using Qt to develop GUI applications does. OTOH, suppose you had a third party library for GUI development that can use Qt as the underlying toolkit (a-la wxWindows), but can also use other toolkits as well. if you'd build your software using this library, it would not make it a derivative work of Qt. of course, in that case, if said library was not GPLed, then its authors might be considered infringing on the GPL license of Qt. -- Oded ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
