> hmm. It seems that all google is able to show me in this context is not > "software industry", but comments on the GPL. Perhaps you can point to > some substantiative material from industry (perhaps not).
It's generally implied by the wording of commercial licences. If it weren't the case that a statically linked program was a derivative work of its components, they wouldn't need to give a royalty free (or with royalty licence) to distribute software linked against a static version of a library, and, as the program has a symmetrical relationship to the library routine, linking it with the library would remove the copyright on the program! As I said, the contentious bit is when dynamic linking is used, and that generally isn't an issue for commercial licences, because they are trying to restrict the distribution of the library, not its use by recipients of code linked against it. In any case, the issue is about the interpretation of "derived work", for dynamic linking. I am pretty sure that the GPL could have been written to require that effective function should be possible with a library with a compatible licence. I haven't studied GPLv3, but it may well be more specific on this point. Of course, most commercial licences purport to be contracts, so are free to be more restrictive than pure licences. _______________________________________________ Lynx-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lynx-dev
