Ahoy,The GPL, by design, is not a contract. As such, you must bring yourself under its influence by wishing to distribute copyrighted work for which the GPL was declared as a license. As such, derivative work can only be defined by the copyright laws applicable to whatever jurisdiction may apply to your case. You are right that it is not clear cut, but that is inherent to copyright laws, and nothing the GPL can do anything about.
On 2003/10/26 21:33, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote:
On Sunday 26 October 2003 20:15, Eran Tromer wrote:
The distiction is anything but simple. [snip]
My answer was given in the form of two separate paragraphs and such a choice of lexical structure usually denotes two separate subjects are discussed. Indeed, such was the case with my answer but you seemed to have missed this completely.
My first sentance ("The distiction is anything but simple.") refers to your first paragraph. The rest of my reply refers to your second paragraph. Indeed, I neglected to employ appropriate lexical constructs and quoting conventions, leading to the present misunderstanding.
I must insist, however, that the definition of "derivative work", though indeed external to the GPL, is far from trivial in our case. Moreover, the GPL further muddies the water in its Section 2 paragraph 5 (not paragraph 4 as I said earlier; that was an off-by-one):
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These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
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You could argue that the above is already implied by copyright law and its effect is thus null; however, I strongly doubt that holds for every country on the globe, and surely subtle differences of phrase can be put to great employ by those so inclined.
There is one thing, as Gilad already mentioned, that the copyright holders CAN do about that. If the copyright holders define a certain activity to NOT be derived work, it will be accepted by everyone not to be considered derived work. Anything else is just laweyrs and businessmen doing what they have been doing for the past decade, instead of developing software and business plans.
For more info and views, I can offer you the following links:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6366 - what is derivative work
http://www.ilaw.com.au/public/licencearticle.html - Problems with open source licenses, as applies to Australian laws. Has an interesting idea as to why free software writers should be payed.
Why should this holds when the copyright owners is not the FSF?
s/FSF/Copyright holder/
For example - the Linux kernel specifically says that user space applications are not derivative work, so they are not. End of story.
I didn't intend to bring up that myth (which, truth be said, doesn't seem very relevant to the discussion). Accepting your rebuttal, however, re-raises the opposite issue. Recall the hazy language used in the GPL, and consider -- if hordes of lawyers had so little doubt that linking is covered, then someone with lesser resources will have a hard time defending his use of (say) a pipe interface to a GPL program whose copyrights are owned by a non-FSF zealot.I guess this is a cost effectiveness tradeoff. Some say you may, some say you may not. The FSF will tell you that if an interface is well publicised, they will make their libraries LGPL anyways.
The general drift is torwards creating licenses that explicitly allow use where it's obvious it's allowed anyways (consider Wine? Does anyone think that a Windows program becomes derivative work of Wine, merely because it's run on Linux? So wine gets a LGPL license to allow what's allowed anyhow).
Eran
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Open Source integration consultant Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/
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