On Thursday 06 November 2003 10:46, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > Oron Peled wrote: > >>Its yet to stand up in court though. > > > >What should stand up in court? The "right" to distribute software > >against its license terms? You must be drinking. > > > >The only thing a court may need to decide is if linking a library > >makes your software a derived work. As I said before, this case > >looks clear enough to most people that even infringing companies > >prefer to release code and not go to court when they get caught. > > > >good day, > > Merely linking with a library does not make your software derived work > of that company! How can that be? > > Let's take an example. Suppose Wine is distributed under the GPL (It's > LGPL, but for the sake of discussion). According to your logic, any > program that is built to link against Wine is a derivative work of Wine, > and therefor must be under the GPL. This is patently absured. Most of > the programs that link with Wine never heard of Wine in their entire > life. They were built to link with Win32 API, expecting Microsoft's > version of it. How can a software that never knew about my program be > considered derivative work of it? > > For that reason, I'm not sure that the QT GPL license indeed means what > some people think it means. I'm pretty sure that's what QT's people > expected it to mean, but that still does not mean this is, indeed, the > case. In any case, I think the Wine example clearly shows that the mere > act of dynamic linking does not yet make a program derived work. >
The big difference between a QT using application and a Win32 one in regard to QT vs. WINE is that in the first case QT is the ONLY existing implmentation supporting that API, hence is quite obvious that when a program is written to use such an API it was written to use QT *specifcially* and not to some general API and therfore it is derived work. With Wine, this is obviously not the case. This is exactly the distinction that Linus's so called "Binary modules excetion" comes from - in fact there is no such exception and as far as Linus is concerned you always have to obey the license (being GPL) when you create derived work. He simply noted that using specific standart set of known APIs does not make your work derivative of his, as is the the case with WINE and Win32 and therfore the licence simply does not apply. The distinciton is between derivative work and not, linking dynamic or otherwise), is simply a pretty good rule of the thumb for derivative work. Good day, Gilad -- Gilad Ben-Yossef <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Codefidence. A name you can trust (tm) http://www.codefidence.com "Half of one of my eyes is already open. I'm going to make coffee now..." -- Kathi 16:08:04 ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
