All of this is entirely legal conjecture, by people who aren't lawyers,
for issues that have not been tested by court and are clearly subject to
interpretation. Since it no longer is relevant to the topic of the
list, can we please either take the discussion offline, or agree to just
let the topic die (on the basis that there cannot be an authoritative
answer until there is some case law upon which to base it?)
- Garrett
On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 09:43 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> 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
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