On Wed, 18 Aug 2010, Joerg Schilling wrote:
Linus is right with his primary decision, but this also applies for static linking. See Lawrence Rosen for more information, the GPL does not distinct between static and dynamic linking.
GPLv2 does not address linking at all and only makes vague references to the "program". There is no insinuation that the program needs to occupy a single address space or mention of address spaces at all. The "program" could potentially be a composition of multiple cooperating executables (e.g. like GCC) or multiple modules. As you say, everything depends on the definition of a "derived work".
If a shell script may be dependent on GNU 'cat', does that make the shell script a "derived work"? Note that GNU 'cat' could be replaced with some other 'cat' since 'cat' has a well defined interface. A very similar situation exists for loadable modules which have well defined interfaces (like 'cat'). Based on the argument used for 'cat', the mere injection of a loadable module into an execution environment which includes GPL components should not require that module to be distributable under GPL. The module only needs to be distributable under GPL if it was developed in such a way that it specifically depends on GPL components.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
