On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > Oron Peled wrote: > > >>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, > > > > > Merely linking with a library does not make your software derived work > of that company! How can that be? > > 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.
Guess you are missing something (as I did first). Qt's code for XWindow system is GPLed, and you can run it under cygwin. But the Windows specific part of code is just QPLed, and as the rest is double licensed, there's no problem in mixing them with non-GPL compatible code. > Shachar > > ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
