Re: Legal status of using a GPL'd LD_PRELOADed with a non-GPL'd app ...

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Timshel Knoll <timshel@debian.org> wrote:
> [please CC all replies to me, I'm not on this list]
> Hi,
> 
> I've posted an ITP[1] for libtrash, a library that uses LD_PRELOAD to
> intercept application calls to unlink(), rename(), open(), fopen(),
> freopen() and other system calls which may delete/truncate files, and
> moves them to a "trash can" rather than deleting them. My question is
> this: libtrash is licensed under the GPL, and the LD_PRELOAD is likely
> to allow non-GPL'd (including non-free) binary code to use it. The
> binary code is not actually "linked" with libtrash, however.

There is no problem here.  The non-free codes haven't included any of
the code from libtrash (e.g. from a header), so they can't be
infringing libtrash's copyright.  There might be some problems if
libtrash were distributed with the non-free stuff as a complete
program, but that is not what is happening here.  If the non-free
stuff included headers from libtrash, then the non-free stuff couldn't
be distributed unless it were GPL'd.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu