On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 11:00:54PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le mardi 02 novembre 2004 à 21:53 +0100, Wesley W. Terpstra a écrit : > > Mr. John Wontshare writes a streaming multicast client. > > To deal with packet loss, he uses my error-correcting library. > > Without my library, Mr. Wontshare's client can't work at all. > > Mr. Wontshare's client represents only a small investment of effort and > > without having had access to my library, he could have never written it. > > He then distributes his client along with my library to end-users. > > If Mr Wontshare's client doesn't work without your software, this is > what I call a derivative work. Whether it is linked to it using ELF or > not is irrelevant.
What you call a derivative work is irrelevant; the only one that matters is what copyright law calls a derivative work. Copyright law defines derivative work, not licenses. If I write a telnet daemon with a couple special escape codes, I can't say "telnet clients that connect to this are derived works". That's just a false statement, even if the client requires my special escape codes. There's no free way to say "only free-software clients can connect to this telnet daemon". -- Glenn Maynard