On Wed, 25 Feb 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > However, a judge might decide that an instruction to the customer to > "do your own linking" was a transparent attempt to bypass the GPL, > and decide to treat it as a violation. Saying "I can't do this and > send you the result, but I can tell you how to do it instead" is a > fishy thing to do. IANAL, TINLA, but I'd say "Don't do that."
Agreed. A judge might decide anything. In practice, lots of software is distributed with dynamic linking requirements (for _technical_ reasons) so, IMHO, it would be relatively difficult to win a claim that this common practice is related to licensing and is somehow fishy by its own nature. Of course, it would be foolish to provoke a law suite by attacking viral goals in software documentation. Documentation should focus on technical issues. For example, it would be foolish to write: "Do your best to find a FSF FooLib to link with our software. While other Foo API libraries might work, our software has been designed to tightly integrate with FooLib and makes extensive use of FooLib extensions and internal features that are not a part of the standard FOO API. If you are not using FSF FooLib, we will not be able to offer any support." One could write: "Our software can be linked with any library supporting Foo API. FooLib library supports Foo API on Linux and BarLib library supports Foo API on NetBSD. Users also report success with CygFoo.dll library on Windows, but FooLib may be faster and more stable. Ported versions of those libraries or other Foo API libraries may be available for your OS. Known compatibility problems are available by searching our bug database at ..." Alex. -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
