2010/3/5 Magnus Therning <mag...@therning.org>: > On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 18:05, Stephen Tetley <stephen.tet...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi Tom >> >> Hmm, its seems I'm due to eat my hat... >> >> To me though, the judgement makes that insistence that using an API is >> making a derivative work. I can't see how that squares up. > > That has, AFAIU, been the intention of the GPL all along. See e.g. > http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html > > It also explains why there has been a discussion in the Linux kernel > community about closed source drivers (e.g. nvidia). > > The LGPL was, AFAIU, written to explicitly allow a shift of license at > the API level. Without the insistence you point out, GPL and LGPL > would be pretty much the same license.
I don't see how what you say is related by the link you provide. They say there is an advantage to make a library GPL when there is no alternative so program using the library is required to be GPL too. As an example, they licensed the C library LGPL because they were already other available C library, so making their one GPL licensed could not really drive more programs to be GPL. Indeed the boundary of a library is its API but that hardly translates to say that the GPL covers the API. Cheers, Thu _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe