RES: What makes software copyrightable anyway?

[Humberto Massa Guimarães <humberto.massa@almg.gov.br>]

"This might be relevant if we planned on distributing only non-working copies of Quagga."

The copies of Quagga that Debian distributes are non-working; try to execute a Debian package...

"Anyways, I'll repeat my earlier assertion: if working copies of Quagga do not use functionality specific to libssl then we're dealing with mere aggregation and are not violating the copyright.  This is true regardless of whether or not anyone believes the copyright is enforceable, and regardless of whether or not Quagga is dynamically or statically linked."

Learned my Technique of Proof by Repeated Assertion, don't ya? But you are 100% right: If Quagga doesn't use functionality specific to libssl, then we are not violating the copyright. Now, if it DOES use functionality specific to libssl, but not to the point where Quagga could be considered a derivative work of libssl, then... we are not violating the copyright.


--
HTH
Massa