Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe

[Måns Rullgård <mru@inprovide.com>]

Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu> writes:

> Brett Parker <iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 12:52:29PM -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
>> > Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> writes:
>> > 
>> > > As has been settled on this list, Eclipse is not a derivative of Kaffe
>> > > and does not contain any copyright-protected portion of Kaffe.  It is
>> > > possible to claim that "Eclipse+Kaffe" is a work based on Kaffe, but
>> > > by the same argument, "Debian" is a work based on Kaffe, and the
>> > > rational interpretation is that both cases are mere aggregation.
>> > 
>> > It seems to me that "mere aggregation" must be the smallest idea that
>> > is still aggregation.  For example, Emacs and Vim are merely
>> > aggregated in Debian.  wget and openssl are not merely aggregated,
>> > because there's more going on there.  It's not necessary to look in
>> > great detail at what *is* going on there -- it's enough to say that
>> > there is more there, so it's not merely aggregation.  It's aggregation
>> > and something else.
>> 
>> wget and openssl are linked, openssl is a build depend of wget, it is
>> very much required to compile it. So, yes, it is not mere aggregation.
>
> What if there was a package wget++ that communicated with openssl
> entirely through system() or exec() calls?  It would construct
> appropriate input and parse openssl's output.  Would that constitute
> linking?  It ends up using all of the same code as the directly linked
> version.

The Gnus newsreader, running under Emacs, does precisely this, and has
done so for many years.

> If it is not linking, why couldn't you do this with all GPL'd
> libraries?  You could write a GPL'd wrapper around a library, and just
> use the wrapper with exec().

A while back, the general agreement seemed to be that this would be
allowed.

> In essence, why does using exec() suddenly break the chain, while a
> linker or classloader does not?

I don't see an obvious difference, but the GPL FAQ does mention this
distinction.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mru@inprovide.com