Re: Use of GPL'd code with proprietary programs

[Alexander Terekhov]

Arnoud Engelfriet wrote:
> 
> Alexander Terekhov wrote:
> > No judge in his right mind can ever consider linking to be
> > exclusive privilege of software copyright owner.
> 
> I'm not sure that the Linux license status is comparable to other
> GPL-licensed works. But in any case, without binding case law
> a prudent lawyer must prepare for the worst. It may be unlikely,
> but if the unlikely interpretation hurts your client, your
> client should prepare for it.

Yes. The only problem is that such "prudence" means tremendous loss 
of world-wide productivity, it puts a barrier for many would-be-
contributors, etc. Many companies, as a matter of "prudent policy",
simply do NOT distribute and do NOT collaborate on the development 
of the [L]GPL'ed works. It does NOT "protect" those works from 
stealing (I mean "clean room"-like process but with the use of the 
same algorithms, methods, nice ideas, etc. -- just get rid of the 
original protected expressions). All those closed-source clones 
would simply not exist.

regards,
alexander.