Walter Landry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Brett Parker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 12:52:29PM -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: >> > Michael Poole <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> > >> > > As has been settled on this list, Eclipse is not a derivative of Kaffe >> > > and does not contain any copyright-protected portion of Kaffe. It is >> > > possible to claim that "Eclipse+Kaffe" is a work based on Kaffe, but >> > > by the same argument, "Debian" is a work based on Kaffe, and the >> > > rational interpretation is that both cases are mere aggregation. >> > >> > It seems to me that "mere aggregation" must be the smallest idea that >> > is still aggregation. For example, Emacs and Vim are merely >> > aggregated in Debian. wget and openssl are not merely aggregated, >> > because there's more going on there. It's not necessary to look in >> > great detail at what *is* going on there -- it's enough to say that >> > there is more there, so it's not merely aggregation. It's aggregation >> > and something else. >> >> wget and openssl are linked, openssl is a build depend of wget, it is >> very much required to compile it. So, yes, it is not mere aggregation. > > What if there was a package wget++ that communicated with openssl > entirely through system() or exec() calls? It would construct > appropriate input and parse openssl's output. Would that constitute > linking? It ends up using all of the same code as the directly linked > version.
The Gnus newsreader, running under Emacs, does precisely this, and has done so for many years. > If it is not linking, why couldn't you do this with all GPL'd > libraries? You could write a GPL'd wrapper around a library, and just > use the wrapper with exec(). A while back, the general agreement seemed to be that this would be allowed. > In essence, why does using exec() suddenly break the chain, while a > linker or classloader does not? I don't see an obvious difference, but the GPL FAQ does mention this distinction. -- Måns Rullgård [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]