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Re: GPL and other licences


From: Lasse Reichstein Nielsen
Subject: Re: GPL and other licences
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 10:13:56 +0100
User-agent: Opera M2/8.51 (Win32, build 7712)

On Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:24:54 +0100, Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> wrote:

The resulting overall program is a compilation of your work and my
work. Your work (function locate_backwards_from_end() that contains
someone else's *modified* code) may well be a derivative work. That
doesn't change the status of the resulting overall program -- it's
still a compilation.

So copying at the function level is compilation, not derivation.
Is it also copying if I only copy part of a function into my own?
Or a single line? Or a single string? Or are programs just compilations
of characters that have all appeared previously in other contexts?

There have to be a line somewhere, separating the cases where putting
things together cretates a new work and where it just creates a compilation.
The line is probably not that easy to draw, hence the current debacle.

If the combination of your function and my function and my code to call
them both in sequence is available as a project that I can bulid to
create a single executable, then the executable appears to all as a
single entity, a single work. The executable is a derived work of your
function. It would be odd if the source code project, shipped in a
single tar.gz file, should not be a representation of the same work.
Not impossible, but not something I would put money on a judge ruling
for, should it come to that.

Derivative programs are created by combining (parts of) existing works
into a new single work.

If you (Alexander Terekhov) disagree with this, I would very much
like you to describe a case where a program is created that *is*
a derivative work of another program.

/L
--
Lasse R. Nielsen - atwork@infimum.dk
 'Faith without judgement merely degrades the spirit divine'





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