Aviad, i think that when you delve into such legal questions - you are reaching the limit of what you would want to do, as a business.
in other words, either use the GPL and hope business B knows what to do, or don't use the GPL to avoid having these legal questions to answer. you should note that vendor B has different lawyers then vendor A - and they may answer the same question differently. i have seen lawyers that said "don't touch anything that is GPL, period", and that said "don't touch anything that is *GPL (i.e. GPL, LGPL), period". specifically, i think your last claim is a confusion between "derived work" and "linked binaries". in other words - this thing works if vendor's A code is under LGPL (it's specifically described in the LGPL), but does not work if vendor's A code is under GPL. --guy On Sun, 2011-04-10 at 21:45 +0300, Aviad Mandel wrote: > On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt <p...@goldshmidt.org> > wrote: > > > This looks to me (reminder: IANAL) as a rather simplistic > attempt to > circumvent GPL. I cannot believe that this trick is legal. > > > I'm likewise skeptic. But if this is illegal, and I don't understand > why, then there's still an important lesson to learn. > > > > Typically, however, the B part will contain pieces that use > the A > library - without those pieces the library will not be needed. > The > rest is a legal (copyright) question: does this make B a > "derivative > work"? > > My question is: Does it matter? Business B owns the B part, so it > doesn't need any permission to distribute the code. No copyright > infringement, no need for license. > > In the wildest scenario, you could claim that the names of the API > functions are copyrighted. So make a wrapper, release it under GPL. > Now you own the rights for the new API function names as well. > > Part A can be distributed anyhow as sources, so there's no problem > here either. Nobody could claim that there's a problem distributing > GPLed sources alongside with anything. > > So where's the catch? Can a compilation be seen as a copyright > infringement? After all, strings from the sources are copied to the > binary, for example. Or is there any EULA-style restriction I'm not > aware of? The binary must not be copied further of course, but who > cares at this point? > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
