Re: Licensing issue with cvs2svn

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 4:20 AM, Oswald Buddenhagen <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 04:48:37AM +0200, Michael Haggerty wrote:
>> Daniel Berlin wrote:
>> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Michael Haggerty wrote:
>> >> The problem is that Mercurial is GPLv2, and it is not clear to me
>> >> that the CollabNet license is compatible with GPLv2; it seems
>> >> likely that it is not.  Therefore it is at best questionable
>> >> whether linking cvs2svn and Mercurial is permitted [1].
>> >
>> > As long as mercurial is separately distributed from cvs2hg and it is
>> > the user who is "linking", it doesn't really matter.
>>
> by any means, that's quite a stretch. if i made my own import library
> for a gpl'd dll so i could legally link my proprietary exe against the
> dll's symbols, would that allow my users to link against that dll? i
> have serious doubts about that.

If you have an import library that specifies nothing but names, you
don't use any GPLv2'd headers to get the interface right,  and you
don't ship a GPLv2'd DLL (IE you rely on users to do what they want),
yeah, i'd say you were fine, because there is nothing that ties you to
that GPLv2'd library at all.
You can have serious doubts if you want, I am simply telling you the
likely legal outcome.
>
>> IANAL but it seems to me that writing code that imports a Python
>> library is analogous to writing C code against a GPLed
>> dynamically-linked library.
>>
> i agree.

That just makes you wrong.
;)

In the dynamic linking situation you have, at the very least, bound
names (if not function ordinals, etc).
In the python situation, absolutely nothing is bound until the user
runs it.  There are no headers, no real interfaces, etc.
From a legal perspective, there is nothing that causes your work to be
a derivative of the GPLv2'd work (legally, derivative does not mean
"based on", btw ;P).
As such, there is no way for your work to be bound by the provisions
of the GPLv2.

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