Mark Kirkwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Joerg, you have a certain opinion... and that is all it is! Other
> people, some of them Debian maintainers have a different one. This is a
> common situation, and it is allowed - in fact desirable in many situations.
>
> If said opinions are believed to effect someones livelihood, then there
> can be a court case where one set of opinions becomes the one that
> everyone within the jurisdiction of that court must (at least in public)
> agree to. That has *not* happened with respect your cdrtools license
> change, hence (many) differing opinions about it.
You missunderstand things - sorry.
Some issues are _so_ obvious that all lawyers have the same opinion without the
need for a court case.
The GPL may not be written in a way that allows it to be understood from the
first attempt you read it, but if you carefully read it 20+x, you will finally
see where things are obvious and whatintention is behind the GPL.
If you like to participate on a fact based discussion, we would first need to
clear up some things.
1) The GPL e.g. does not use the term "linking" - it is completely based
on the Copyright term "derived work". If you find an attempt to explain
the GPL that is based on the term "linking", throw it away.
NOTE: This includes the GPL FAQ from the FSF :-(
2) The word "contains" implies a direction. The sentence
- "the bucket contains water"
has a different meaning than the sentence
- "the water contains a bucket"
Keep this in mind when we discuss:
GPL §2 a):
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
---
We also need to define the boundaries for something we call "the work".
"The work" does not include the libraries it used.
Let us take the program:
main()
{
printf("Hello world\n");
}
It does not contain the implementation of the function printf() but it uses it.
Bloch/Debian claim that the printf() implementation needs to be published under
GPL if the above program was published under GPL.
Well, check the GPL above and answer the following questions:
1) Is the program above "contained" in the printf() function?
2) Is prinf() a "derived work" from above program?
Any non-moronic person would of course answer both questions with "no".
As you answered both questions with "no", it is obvious that the program above
may rightfully _use_ printf() without the need to put printf() under GPL.
The example above describes the _only_ relationship between GPL code and
non-GPL code that appears in the distribution cdrtools. It is therefore obvious
that there is _no_ license problem in cdrtools.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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