Lawrence Rosen scripsit: > But what is it about the copyright law that leads you to believe that > the degree of triviality to wrap a copyrighted work as a black box > makes a difference in the definition of a derivative work?
For one thing, if the wrapper is too trivial we won't have sufficient originality to be a derivative work, and the work will just be a copy of the original. > And what is wrong, ethically or morally or according to the open source > creed, with encouraging open source black boxes to be put together in > imaginative ways without forcing those ways to be disclosed? Exactly. After all, nobody supposes that you can't write a proprietary shell or Perl program that invokes GNU utilities. (Hey, what kind of a LK would I be if I couldn't argue out of both sides of my mouth before lunch?!) > Let's be candid about what behavior we want to affect by our reciprocal > licenses. I believe we want to make sure that changes, bug fixes and > enhancements to our software are returned to the commons. But we don't > want to discourage the use of our open source software in combination > with other software, proprietary or open. By distinguishing between > *derivative works* and *collective works* as the copyright law itself > does, we can better achieve this balance. The sticky point is this: It's settled that a binary is a derivative work of its source. It's obvious that a source tarball is a mere collective work, or "aggregation" as the GPL calls it. What, then, is the status of a binary compiled from the tarball? It evidently is a derivative of the collection; is it a derivative of the source works as well? Larry says (in effect) no; Eben says yes. Infinite are the arguments of mages. -- "But I am the real Strider, fortunately," John Cowan he said, looking down at them with his face [EMAIL PROTECTED] softened by a sudden smile. "I am Aragorn son http://www.ccil.org/~/cowan of Arathorn, and if by life or death I can http://www.reutershealth.com save you, I will." --LotR Book I Chapter 10 -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3