Re: hypothitical nonfree question
On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 01:02:47PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> * Jules Bean
>
> | I'm not aware of any adequate precedents, and I personally doubt
> | that you can draw a technical line in the sand (fork+exec is OK,
> | linking isn't): I don't think a judge would be interested in the
> | technical details.
>
> If you have a non-free shell, are you saying that the shell is not
> allowed to fork()+exec() GPL-ed programs? I think there is a HUGE
> difference there.
There is a huge difference between a non-free shell which can start any
application, and a non-free frontend to a specific application, which will
not work with any other program or without the program.
You can not look at isolated technical details and derive a judgement for
all cases which contain this detail. This is not how law works. Instead,
you have to look at all the circumstances, the people involved, what their
intention was, ... and then you get one ruling for this specific case.
We don't have all information available here to make even a wild guess. Nor
is it the right place to discuss this, IMHO.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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