Re: GPL and Copyright Law (Was: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe)
On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 02:16:37PM -0800, Michael K. Edwards wrote:
> Summary: Canadian law has a few interesting differences from US law,
> but I reach the same main conclusions -- the GPL is a valid offer of
> contract; technical distinctions like "linking" vs. "interpretation"
> are irrelevant to its legal force; and a judge is unlikely to permit
> the GPL to reach across a published functional interface irrespective
> of the FSF FAQ or of the GPL variants the FSF has created (LGPL,
> Classpath, gcc, etc.) in order to relax the, in my opinion, imaginary
> barrier to linking GPL code to code under other licences.
Remember that the judge's primary interest functionality is going to be
centered around determining the scope of the source code requirement from
section 3. The judge would only care about determining which sources
were required for the GPLed binaries in question.
You're right that one technology being used instead of another won't
make a difference if the same end is achieved. But, in the same way,
"reach across a published functional interface" is a technical detail
whose significance depends on the end which is achieved.
--
Raul
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