GNU Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda Eben "Anarchism Triumphant" and "dot Communist Manifesto" Moglen is drooling down his Gerber bib again:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/interviews/6388/1/ ------- Question: Is there any provision on GPL V3 regarding linking? I'm not a lawyer so bear with me; from what I've understood there was always some conflict or some different opinion between what happens when you link with GCC statically or dynamically regarding what your source code should be in the GPL, or not. And I don't think this question has always been clearly answered. Moglen: I think the question was largely an imposition of uncertainty by outside forces and myself. But what GPL3 did to attempt to resolve it in this very sentence that Mark was asking about the definition of corresponding source code says that the corresponding source code to a work includes all those libraries linked statically or dynamically, which the work requires an order to run that are not system libraries. So the answer to your question, we hope, is this time clear; the Foundation always believed and continues to believe that codes statically linked to other code can be part of a single combined work. Where it is part of a single combined work you need copyright permission to copy, modify, or redistribute that work as a whole. And if you distribute it in ways which are--which have the result of reducing other people's rights below you're either infringing or you're secularly liable for infringement. The requirement would be to prove that the dynamically linked work is--despite the dynamic linking situation in which the code establishes its connections--nonetheless part of a single work. Are there times when from a copyright law point of view you would find code dynamically linked to other code--part of a single work? Yes; I have no doubt. If you take a thing which is an intrinsically single program and you split it in half and put half its routines into something which then is linked together to make it share the library, and you run the executable with half the routines against it, and they share their control blocks in a completely indiscriminate fashion, and they write in one another's memory areas --if the only thing that happens is every jump instruction reads a table first to figure out where to go to, then nothing has happened from a copyright law point of view that should change our judgment about what's going to work and what isn't. At the same time, if it is clear that that dynamically linked library exists for hundreds of purposes, that there are other substitute dynamically linked libraries which could have been used instead right--I use readln sometimes but Ted doesn't use readln; he wishes to use something else and the thing that he wishes to use is a complete substitute for readln and then there's no way in the world that one would want to say that those two dynamically linked activities are part of the same work. So I think that the static linking, dynamic linking distinction was under-specified. What it should have said was static linking is a necessary and sufficient condition to find the presence of a single work. Dynamic linking is neither necessary nor sufficient but a dynamically linked work may be either a separate and independent work with outside the boundaries of GPL or part of the same overall work requiring treatment under GPL and it is the facts of how the programs or routines communicate, which makes the difference. ------- regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
