Re: On interpreting licences (was: KDE not in Debian?)

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2000 at 10:48:20AM -0800, David Johnson wrote:
> I have put this opinion forth (that Qt is distinct from the
> application and not a module) in the past, but each and every time
> I have met with immense disagreement and vile language, so that I
> have become "gun shy" and have refrained from stating what I see as
> obvious.

Please don't confuse the immense disagreement with any vile language.

There is no point in the vile language.

There is a very good reason for the immense disagreement:  Copyright
law is blind to computer technology.  And, copyright violations are
usually much harder to prove than GPL cases (normally people don't bother
attaching the original licenses to plagarized works, for example).

So copyright law grants some fairly broad protections.  Without broad
protections, you could never prove copyright violation.  [Which, some
people might argue, is a good reason for getting rid of copyright laws --
but that's a whole different discussion.]

And, at least in the U.S., you don't actually have to make the illegal
copies to be guilty of copyright violation: you just have to make it
easy for the illegal copies to be made.

So treating "unlinked" code as independent works doesn't cut it, not
when the usual practice is to use these "independent pieces" together
on the target machine.

Copyright law doesn't grant any special excemption for dynamic linking.

Now, it's true that this particular issue hasn't gone to court.  However,
other countries have different sorts of broad protections that result in
similar conclusions (for example, Canadian law grants copyright holders a
"moral right" or some such...).  [Also, there's the Objective C situation
(where gcc mods were distributed as ".o" files and the end user was
given instructions on how to build the modified gcc).  People objectived,
and eventually the sources for those mods were released under the GPL --
which indicates that someone that put a lot of work into writing those
mods was eventually convinced that trying to work around the GPL this
was was a bad idea.]

-- 
Raul