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Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe



Måns Rullgård <mru@inprovide.com> writes:

> Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>
>> "Michael K. Edwards" <m.k.edwards@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> [no longer relevant to debian-java, I think]
>>>
>>> On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 15:28:57 -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen
>>> <bts@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>>>  You are ignoring the
>>>> creative act performed by the programmer who arranged calls to
>>>> functions within libc.  That was creative effort on his part which
>>>> critically involves a copy of libc.
>>>
>>> As is the creation of a critical essay on libc.  But that's not a
>>> derivative work either.
>>
>> But an annotated edition of libc is.  A program seems far more similar
>> to an annotated edition than to a critical essay -- since it includes
>> a copy of the library, after all, and pointers into it.
>
> Now you stopped making sense.  A program includes only references to a
> library, not the library itself.

The program makes neither functional nor creative sense without the
library component.  A binary -- which we usually think of as a program
-- is only part of a program.  All of the libraries included in it are
part of it also; that's why we ship them along.

> A distribution, e.g. Debian, might include both the program and the
> library.  I don't see a problem with distributing a collection of
> programs, where some of them can be combined in ways that violate
> some license, as long as all of them still have legitimate uses.

I don't see a problem with that either.  But the default library
loaded for some soname should probably be legal to *distribute* as a
combination with anything Debian is distributing set to load it.

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu



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