GPL as an evaluation license

[guy keren]

Aviad,

i think that when you delve into such legal questions - you are reaching
the limit of what you would want to do, as a business.

in other words, either use the GPL and hope business B knows what to do,
or don't use the GPL to avoid having these legal questions to answer.

you should note that vendor B has different lawyers then vendor A - and
they may answer the same question differently. i have seen lawyers that
said "don't touch anything that is GPL, period", and that said "don't
touch anything that is *GPL (i.e. GPL, LGPL), period".

specifically, i think your last claim is a confusion between "derived
work" and "linked binaries". in other words - this thing works if
vendor's A code is under LGPL (it's specifically described in the LGPL),
but does not work if vendor's A code is under GPL.

--guy

On Sun, 2011-04-10 at 21:45 +0300, Aviad Mandel wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt <pub at goldshmidt.org>
> wrote:
>         
>         
>         This looks to me (reminder: IANAL) as a rather simplistic
>         attempt to
>         circumvent GPL. I cannot believe that this trick is legal.
>         
> 
> I'm likewise skeptic. But if this is illegal, and I don't understand
> why, then there's still an important lesson to learn.
>  
> 
>         
>         Typically, however, the B part will contain pieces that use
>         the A
>         library - without those pieces the library will not be needed.
>         The
>         rest is a legal (copyright) question: does this make B a
>         "derivative
>         work"?
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
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