Re: GPL and other licences

[Alan Mackenzie]

Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> wrote on Fri, 03 Feb 2006 08:20:32 +0100:

> Barry Margolin wrote: [...]
>> OK, so why are you inventing new issues, rather than addressing the
>> topic of the thread?  The OP said "a derivative work combined from
>> software licensed under the Apache Software Licence 2.0 and software
>> licensed under the GNU GPL 2.0".  This sounds to me like he's using
>> pieces of source code, not combining executables.

> Because just like with combined executable, copying source code doesn't
> create a derivative work. If anything, it creates a compilation.

Alexander, you're mistaken here.  Copying and adapting existing source
code is an every day activity in programming.

For example, just last week I needed a function which searches backwards
a maximum of 3000 bytes from the end of file for "Local Variables:", and
then deletes any following lines containing "mode:" or "eval:".  I
extracted the code which did the searching out of an existing function,
then added the bits to do the deletion.

The resulting function is in no way a "compilation" - it is a derivative
of the original function.

> When you print two short stories on the same sheet of paper (or PDF),
> you're not creating a derivative work. And the same goes when you put
> several pieces of source code under different licenses in one file.
> Think tarball.

That is true.  However, when you take two short stories, commingle
paragraphs from one of them with paragraphs from the other, connecting
them up with sentences of your own to give a new short story, you have a
derivative work.  Doing this may be unusual for stories, but is a
perfectly normal way of creating software.

[ .... ]

> regards,
> alexander.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").