Re: Licensing Problems with Debian Packages (Was Re: Copyright lawyers analysis of Andreas Pour's Interpretation)
Raul Miller wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2000 at 02:23:59PM -0500, Andreas Pour wrote:
> > OK, perhaps we are making progress after all. It appears that you have
> > now abandoned the argument that Qt itself must be licensed under the
> > GPL. So if that is true, all you require is that the collective work
> > in kghostview/Qt be licensed under the GPL, with "collective work"
> > having the meaning provided in the Copyright Act.
> >
> > Please clarify/correct any mistake in the above summary, and we can
> > proceed from there.
>
> I'm not sure what kind of distinction you're trying to draw.
I'm asking a very straight-forward question: if you link a
dynamic library
to a GPL Program, does the source code of the library have
to be licensed
under the GPL? I think you are really waffling on this
issue. Please give
a straight answer to this question.
[ . . . ]
> >
> > I find this statement puzzling. Is it not your position that libc is
> > not part of the "complete source code"? You stated that above. If that
> > is true, then Qt must also not be part of the "complete source code".
> > If you disagree with this, please explain why libc is not, and Qt is,
> > part of the complete source code, for purposes of Section 3(a) of the
> > GPL.
>
> I agree that libc is part of the complete source code for programs like
> grep on a Debian system. Yet it is not the complete source code for those
> programs. This doesn't seem to me to be a very puzzling idea.. would
> you think that libc represents the complete source code for grep?
>
> Furthermore, I agree that libqt would also be a part of the complete
> source code for programs like kghostview. The difference between libc
> and kghostview is that while libc has a license which grants all the
> rights required by the GPL for grep, libqt doesn't have a license which
> grants all the rights required by the GPL for kghostview.
I know the licenses are different. The question is still,
does the "complete
source code" to a GPL program have to be licensed under the
GPL? In particular,
if grep links to libc, does libc have to be licensed under
the GPL, under your
reading of Sections 3(a)/2(b) of the GPL?
[ ... ]
> > By some examples you mean if you take some libc source code and use it
> > in a GPL'd program. I am referring strictly to the case of
> > dynamic linking. In that situation, do you see libc/Qt being part of
> > the complete source code for purposes of GPL Section 3(a), or not? A
> > simple "Yes I do"/"No I don't, for the following reasons . . . ."
> > answer would be nice :-).
>
> I do see it as being a part of the complete source code -- however,
> I do not see it as representing the complete source code. Which is to
> say that I consider the GPL relevant as a collective copyright which
> applies to the library for that case.
Please explain what that means. How does the collective
copyright apply to
a component of the collective work? When I read the
Copyright Act it is
clear to me that a collective copyright is separate from the
component works.
Ciao,
Andreas
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