On 11/14/2008 12:07 PM, Berwin A Turlach wrote:
G'day Duncan,
On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:16:35 -0500
Duncan Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 11/14/2008 11:01 AM, Berwin A Turlach wrote:
> But I remember that a situation as you describe was hotly debated on
> gnu.misc.discuss in the mid-90s; thus, I am talking obviously GPL 2.
> Unfortunately I do not remember which software/company was involved
> and how the dispute was solved. But they did something like you
> described: distributed a binary and asked the user to download
> additionally some GPL software and then run both together. If this
> were allowed, the GPL would have a hole in it that you could drive a
> truck through. :)
If the binary being released had no GPL content in it, then there
would be no basis to complain about anything. I'd guess that the
particular case required GPL'd headers in order to compile. That
would be enough to say that the binary includes GPL'd code.
I am not so sure about whether it is is a matter of including GPL'd
headers. After all, if I just want to call some functions from a
library libXXX and I know what the arguments of those function is, then
I could write their prototypes into my own non-GPL'd headers.
The question is really, does the software that I distribute work only
if it is dynamically linked against libXXX and are there several
implementations of the functionality that I need from libXXX?
I'm not a lawyer either, but I'd be surprised to hear that there is any
legal support for that interpretation.
Duncan Murdoch
If the
only implementation of libXXX is a GPL'd one, then my software is a
derivative work of it. When I compiled it, I must have had the GPL
version of libXXX on my system.
To be more specific, looking at my Debian system, I can see that
/usr/lib/libXXX might link to /etc/alternatives/libXXX
and /etc/alternatives/libXXX links to the actual version, which could
be a commercial library, a GPL'd one or one under some other
open-software licence. If there are several alternatives for libXXX (for
the functions that I need), then there is no way of telling what I have
on my system and what I used when I created my binary which is linked
to /usr/lib/libXXX. So I can give my binary to others and tell them
that they have to get a version of /usr/lib/libXXX; and that one option
would be to install the GPL'd version obtainable from XYZ.
But if the only library that implements the functionality that my
program needs is a GPL'd version, then it is pretty clear
that /etc/alternatives/libXXX on my machine (if the /etc/alternatives
set up is used at all) must point to the GPL'd libXXX. Thus, when I
created the binary, I created a derivative work of libXXX, whether I
used its GPL'd headers or not.
But I guess I should continue to say that IANAL. :)
Cheers,
Berwin
PS: Hope I managed again to not getting the flame-thrower started. :)
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