Re: Question about licensing

[Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@msu.edu>]

Bruce Perens <bruce@va.debian.org> writes:

   From: Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>
   > And if someone writes a single-purpose GUI shell for the networking
   > code in a certain proprietary desktop OS (to pick a completly random
   > name, suppose the fancy GUI shell was called 'Netscape'), it should
   > be considered a deriviative work of said proprietaty OS?
   > 
   > Some guys in Redmond, WA would be delighted to hear that.

   Don't be silly. The Microsoft C library code is explicitly licensed to be
   incorporated into applications. Dpkg is not. The Linux C library, for example,
   is under the LGPL, instead of the GPL, to address _exactly_ this issue.

I don't think he's being silly.  I think he brings up a valid point.
The Microsoft C library source is licensed for incorporation into
applications, but Microsoft OSes are not.  Netscape, when running
under Windows, uses parts of the Windows OS, through shared libraries
and system calls or whatever Windows has as equivalents.  Linux neatly
sidesteps these issues through Linus' ruling that use of system calls
don't constitute linkage in GPL sense, but I've never seen Microsoft
say the same thing, and if given the chance I doubt they would.
-- 
"To the engineer, the world is a toy box full of sub-optimized and
 feature-poor toys."
--Scott Adams