Re: [kaffe] Using kaffe(GPL2) with other DFSG-compat licenses
On Mon, 2002-08-05 at 16:55, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> /* 2.1 */
> The second case is quite clear, I think. Take a
> program explicitely using a GPLd library, for example
> a java program using Qt through JNI. In that case the
> license of the interpreter should not matter, as the
> code is explicitely linking to a GPLd library.
You must be careful with this line of reasoning. For instance, someone
just released a Qt implementation of AWT. I can't see that the existence
of this Qt implementation has any effect on proprietary programs using
the AWT. They might use the Qt AWT library and would never know that
they weren't using the standard edition.
Part of showing that malicious linking is showing that the distributor
of the program "knows" invalid linking is occuring. A version of Debian
with Kaffe, Sun JVM, non-GPL java, GPL java, the Qt AWT implementation,
a standard AWT implementation and a proprietary AWT implementation is a
reasonable and legal aggregation of code. There is a chance that someone
might configure their box to use the Qt AWT and then run proprietary
Java code but neither the original author of the non-GPL code had a
clear intent to create this situation.
This is one of the reasons I find RMS's resistance to digital rights
management fascinating. The one facility that could insure GPL
compliance would be DRM features built into the library loaders (ld and
ClassLoaders) but that's another story.
--
_____________________________________________________________________
Ean Schuessler ean@brainfood.com
Brainfood, Inc. http://www.brainfood.com
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