On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 01:12:09PM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > On Wednesday, May 7, 2003, at 01:50 AM, Branden Robinson wrote: > > >Or are you wanting to restrict the problem domain to cases where an > >interface innovated in a GPLed library hasn't been cloned yet? > > Given: > 1) Library GPLLib is under the GPL > 2) Perl module Iface provides an interface to various implementations > of similar features, and the user selects which implementation to > use > 3) Perl modules PM uses GPLLib to implement Iface > 4) Perl program P is under a GPL-incompatible license > > Question: > Is is permissible for P to use PM through Iface? I would say yes, and I think that 2) is the critical issue. Without 2), this procedure looks like an effort to create a Perl module Iface which is a shim to let other programs P make themselves infrining derivatives of GPLLib. But with 2), this procedure looks like an effort to create an abstraction layer Iface, which is a shim to let other programs P interoperate with a de-facto standard. Programs P cannot *necessarily* be derivative works of GPLLlib in this scenario, and therefore such programs are not *necessarily* infringing of the GNU GPL at the time they are distributed. This is my opinion, and I cannot claim to speak for the FSF, but the above sounds exactly like the libreadline/libeditline situation to me, and to my knowledge the FSF has never gone after people who *weren't* using libreadline-as-libreadline with a GPL-incompatible application. NcFTP is an example of a program that did just that, according to the FSF. -- G. Branden Robinson | The software said it required Debian GNU/Linux | Windows 3.1 or better, so I branden@debian.org | installed Linux. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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