Merely linking with a library does not make your software derived work of that company! How can that be?Its yet to stand up in court though.
What should stand up in court? The "right" to distribute software against its license terms? You must be drinking.
The only thing a court may need to decide is if linking a library makes your software a derived work. As I said before, this case looks clear enough to most people that even infringing companies prefer to release code and not go to court when they get caught.
good day,
Let's take an example. Suppose Wine is distributed under the GPL (It's LGPL, but for the sake of discussion). According to your logic, any program that is built to link against Wine is a derivative work of Wine, and therefor must be under the GPL. This is patently absured. Most of the programs that link with Wine never heard of Wine in their entire life. They were built to link with Win32 API, expecting Microsoft's version of it. How can a software that never knew about my program be considered derivative work of it?
For that reason, I'm not sure that the QT GPL license indeed means what some people think it means. I'm pretty sure that's what QT's people expected it to mean, but that still does not mean this is, indeed, the case. In any case, I think the Wine example clearly shows that the mere act of dynamic linking does not yet make a program derived work.
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Open Source integration consultant Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/
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