On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:33 AM, DJ Delorie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> As I said, in view of this - an apparent belief that the GPL can bind >> code that bears no relation in copyright law anything GPLed - I would >> not trust anything the FSF might say about copyright and the GPL. > > Ah, that case. The idea is that, if you write a program which cannot > be compiled unless you link in a GPL'd library, you've created a > "combined work". This is a legal term, not a software term. The > FSF's position is that such a combined work exists as a legal whole > even if broken into parts merely for distribution. That goes against > your belief:
Even if the code that *can* link to GPL'ed code is in #if 0 ... #endif? > Now, if readline used a standard API and there were multiple > implementations of that API, some of which were non-GPL, that would be > a different case altogether. Readline is interesting in that its licence is specifically chosen to give authors of works an incentive to licence their work under the [same version of the] GPL. Sorry, I don't have a link - it's been too long ago - perhaps on the FSF philosophy page. So in a way the effect here is exactly as intended: cool feature not present in gs because of that work's authors' choice not to use the GPL [and only the GPL] for their own work. I didn't say that I agreed fully with this tactic... ObGeda: will gedaquery link to -lreadline? _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
