RE: Roaring Penguin's view

Am Mit, 2002-06-12 um 16.11 schrieb Patrik Stridvall:
 
> Ah, now we get to one of the core problems with the GPL.
> The difference between "derive a product from" and
> "develop a product for" is not defined by the GPL
> quite the opposite. However note that regardless of what the
> GPL say copyright law is unlikely to let the GPL push the
> issue too far. Even the FSF recognize this.

The FSF if pretty clear about its viewpoint: Linking (static or shared)
forms a derived product, communication through IPC mechanisms doesn't.
The FSF itself states that that's eventually up to a judge to decide.

In this respect, the GPL is indeed more restrictive than some commercial
licenses (Microsoft grants you to link with their core DLLs - is that
true for _all_ DLLs?)

Thus, if glibc became LGPL, you could still develop a GPL'd wrapper app 
that would communicate with your non-free program through e.g. a socket,
transferring the library calls to glibc, just like wineserver is
currently doing it for wine (though not for licensing reasons).
Actually, I am pretty certain that such a wrapper would be among the
first things created if glibc became GPL, probably by community members
who'd disagree with that move.

Martin

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