<div dir="ltr">On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pub@goldshmidt.org">pub@goldshmidt.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im"><br>
</div>This looks to me (reminder: IANAL) as a rather simplistic attempt to<br>
circumvent GPL. I cannot believe that this trick is legal.<br><div class="im"></div></blockquote><div><br>I'm likewise skeptic. But if this is illegal, and I don't understand why, then there's still an important lesson to learn.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
Typically, however, the B part will contain pieces that use the A<br>
library - without those pieces the library will not be needed. The<br>
rest is a legal (copyright) question: does this make B a "derivative<br>
work"?<br></blockquote></div><br>My question is: Does it matter? Business B owns the B part, so it doesn't need any permission to distribute the code. No copyright infringement, no need for license.<br><br>In the wildest scenario, you could claim that the names of the API functions are copyrighted. So make a wrapper, release it under GPL. Now you own the rights for the new API function names as well.<br>
<br>Part A can be distributed anyhow as sources, so there's no problem here either. Nobody could claim that there's a problem distributing GPLed sources alongside with anything.<br><br>So where's the catch? Can a compilation be seen as a copyright infringement? After all, strings from the sources are copied to the binary, for example. Or is there any EULA-style restriction I'm not aware of? The binary must not be copied further of course, but who cares at this point?<br>
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