Re: Licensing Problems with Debian Packages (Was Re: Copyright lawyers analysis of Andreas Pour's Interpretation)
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.
Raul Miller wrote:
> > I'm not sure what kind of distinction you're trying to draw.
On Mon, Feb 21, 2000 at 03:39:47PM -0500, Andreas Pour wrote:
> 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.
Let me ask you a "straightforward" question: if you dissolve sugar in
water, can you make the sugar boil?
[Seems to me that while you can make the sugar water boil, the sugar
itself does not. There might be some rather exceptional conditions
where you could make sugar boil, but they have very little to do with
the conditions where sugar water boils.]
Similarly, the program, which includes the library, has to be license
under the GPL while the library -- considered as an entity unto itself --
does not.
If this doesn't make sense to you then I'd say that your question is,
in fact, not at all straightforward.
> > > 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?
The library (using LGPL terminology) has to grant permission to be
included in the collective work (the "Program", using GPL terminology),
and the work as a whole is distributed under the terms of the collective
license.
So: the complete source code has to be licensed under the GPL, but
some of the individual elements of it do not.
> > > 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.
The collective copyright is a separate license from that which is applied
to some of the component works. The collective copyright applies to the
work as a whole. The work as a whole is distributed under the terms of
the collective copyright. Where individual copyrights apply (which are
different from the collective copyright) they must make it legal for
those individual parts to be distributed under the collective copyright.
I don't understand what part of this isn't clear to you. In earlier
messages I thought you indicated you understood these concepts and agreed
with them.
--
Raul
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