Re: New licence and driver SDK ?

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 01:42:02PM +0100, Alexander Terekhov wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> > 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > A new problem with the new licence was taken to my attention, concerning
> > the SDK. It seems some files of the SDK, which are linked with the
> > hardware drivers may be affected by the licence change, which would
> > preclude pure GPLed third party drivers.
> 
> Linking doesn't constitute creation of derivative work. The resulting
> "combined work" (executable/tarball/bootable-image/CD/whatnot) is a 
> compilation (see the statute), not a derivative work.
> 
> http://www.digital-law-online.com/lpdi1.0/treatise27.html
> (see VI.D.4. Derivative Works and Compilations)
> 
> Read also the following message (and the entire thread):
> 
> http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:7690
> 
> <quote>
> 
> No open source license can prohibit any licensee from creating 
> proprietary combinations of independently-created proprietary 
> and open source software that merely work together through APIs. 
> Such combinations are not "derivative works" of software.
> 
> </quote>

Well, this may well be true for linking to client-side libraries,
altough it seems contrary to all that i have been lead to believe this
past years. And even there, i believe this is only the case if you can
find alternatives libraries fullfilling the API in question, but this is
not the case for the X drivers.

Friendly,

Sven Luther