Re: Question About GNU General Public License

[David Kastrup]

Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> writes:

> < misc.int-property and misc.legal.computing added >
> 
> Isaac wrote:
> [...]
> > > If what you call "make a system call" is just a command line call,
> > > then it is pretty much established that command line calls imply you
> > > are using the software, not deriving from it.
> > 
> > I think the only thing really established is that the FSF will not
> > sue you if you do this.  I am not aware of any legal authority
> > supporting such a distinction based on copyright law.  I'm also not
> > certain that an author is required to use this interpretation on
> > his own code even if he incorporates FSF code into his work.
> > 
> > My personal opinion is that in a situation where I would object to
> > dyanmic linking to my code, I would not be pleased with some who
> > used some other form of IPC to accomplish the an equivalent result.
> 
> Yeah.

And again a number of stupid unrelated quotes.

Just for the record, I mentioned this once already: dynamic linking
enters a lot of binary addresses into a program, making it an image
in memory that is completely dependent and "linked" with the library
in question.  Calling dlopen from inside of a module to load a
library and call its functions explicitly instead of by linking
doesn't.

While this is a fine line, it is obviously thick enough to have caused
RMS to refuse letting a module loader (which would have used dlopen)
be put into Emacs because he thinks that in that case
Emacs/proprietary combinations could become more legally viable than
desirable.

Of course, on a typical system Emacs is dynamically linked with a
number of libraries already, but not via the "dlopen by program"
method.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum