Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 17:36:27 -0500, Raul Miller <moth@debian.org> wrote:
[snip things with which I agree completely]
> Once again: linking is a detail. It's not something which copyright
> law makes any special allowances for. Depending on the circumstances
> linking might be analogous to typesetting, or book binding, or sticking
> phrases together, or any of a variety of other actions.
>
> But if a program won't run properly until after it's linked, it's pretty
> clear that linking is a part of the process for publishing that program.
Right. But whether it will run isn't a copyright criterion, any more
than whether a work of criticism will make any sense if not read
side-by-side with the work it critiques. One can certainly write a
contract that purports to rescind a license if the licensee uses a
piece of software for purposes or via techniques of which the licensor
doesn't approve. That contract could contain terms of are like
"dynamic linking" and still be enforceable to the extent allowed by
applicable law.
The GPL isn't written that way. It invites licensees to interpret
"derivative work" as a term of law. I don't think that either writing
a library-dependent program or linking it with that library, at build
time or at link time, creates a derivative work of the library, for
the reasons I have cited.
Cheers,
- Michael
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