On 3/25/2010 11:30 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
It would appear that you are not familiar with the realities of dynamic linking on UNIX-like operating systems. Dynamically linked libraries (we are not talking about Windows DLLs here) are carefully versioned and tend to become incompatible with their predecessors pretty regularly. That's why you need to compile a program using dynamic libraries with the corresponding header versions for the API versioning.
That's irrelevant. If you do not copy and distribute the library as part of the program, then the license of the library cannot affect the right to copy and distribute the program. Copyright law does not care that a program needs a certain version of a library to work correctly, because copyright law does not care whether or not a program works at all. It's only copying and distribution that count.
It is a quite special case to explicitly load a shared executable (and call its entry points) for which not particular headers were used in the preparation of the binary. I do not even know the library/system call for that.
That the text of a program contains indications that the program will use certain libraries in certain ways is generally irrelevant to the copyright status of the program. There is generally only one way to express within the text of a program that the program will use elements of a library, and therefore that expression is not copyrightable because it lacks originality as defined by copyright law - see the Lexmark printer cartridge case <http://www.mwe.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/publications.nldetail/object_id/e9bc6a89-03dc-4e37-9dba-d3d324d6a94c.cfm>. To put it more simply, that the program contains "#include "joe-lib.h"' and 'JOEbits jb;' and 'JOEjob(jb, "hello");' does not generally cause the text of the program to fall under the copyright of the JOE library, nor does it cause the compiled binary which dynamically links to the JOE library to fall under the copyright of the JOE library. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
