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.
No, that's an excellent summary of what I'm not saying.
I'm saying that no single technical detail (e.g. whether it's
fork+exec or dynamic linking) is likely to decide the case; rather
it's whether or not the complete work is a derivative work of the
GPLed one.
For example, you're quite right that the non-free shell is allowed to
run GPL'ed programs. What is more, that's got nothing to do with
fork()+exec(): if I devise a 'running' mechanism which involved
dlopen()ing the 'executable' (which must be in a specific form) and
calling some predefined symbol or offset, it would still be OK. (ISTR
there's a java shell which works along this line, running programs in
the current interpreter rather than spawning a new interpreter).
Jules
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