A little GPL riddle (was: GPL as an evaluation license)

[Aviad Mandel]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Oleg Goldshmidt <pub at goldshmidt.org>wrote:

>
> I hope it resolves your confusion.
>
> Unfortunately not. I am familiar with the relevant parts, and I agree that
if you read them over and over again, you get kinda convinced that mixing
GPL code with closed-source objects is the work of satan. But I'm looking
for a smoking gun.

If the object code was compiled against GPLed header files, it may be
considered containing copyrighted material from its GPLed counterpart, but
the GPLed wrappers solve this. But if nothing was really *copied* from the
GPLed code, the GPL has no say about the object code.

So if both sets of software, proprietary and GPLed, arrived Glatt Kosher on
the target computer, where is the wrongdoing? It's true that the
mix-compiled binary can't be *copied* anymore, because the GPL is void from
this point and on, but is the compilation itself illegal? Or the execution
of the binary?

To my best knowledge, the only attempt to control the usage of software,
once copied legally on a computer, is those questionable EULAs, which take
the form of a contract between the user and the software vendor, and are not
based on any general laws.

This may be a good time to say: IANAL either.
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