In article <[email protected]>, JEDIDIAH <[email protected]> wrote: > Not really. The only real question is what constitutes a "derivative > work". > > There are certain people that have an interest in "misunderstanding > this".
Such as the FSF? A pure copyright license, such as what they claim the GPL is, cannot protect against all of the things they want to protect against, and so they make claims that aren't backed by copyright law as to what makes a work subject to GPL. For instance, suppose you have a GPL library, X, with a publicly documented interface. No other library implements that interface. They say that if you write code that can use X, your code must be under GPL. However, suppose there is also a library, Y, that provides the same interface as X, and Y is under, say, a BSD license. Now, according to the FSF, you can write code that calls X without it being a derivative work. Copyright law simply doesn't work that way. The existence or non-existence of Y is completely irrelevant to the question "is your code a derivative work of X?". Y is relevant when it comes to trying to prove the answer, but it does not change what the answer is (for example, if you are accused of making a derivative work of X, and Y exists, then you can simply claim you copied from Y, not X, and the authors of X will probably have a hard time proving it was really X you copied from). -- --Tim Smith _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
