Re: Recommendation for a CL data structures library

[Hyman Rosen]

On 3/25/2010 11:30 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> It would appear that you are not familiar with the realities of dynamic
> linking on UNIX-like operating systems.  Dynamically linked libraries
> (we are not talking about Windows DLLs here) are carefully versioned and
> tend to become incompatible with their predecessors pretty regularly.
> That's why you need to compile a program using dynamic libraries with
> the corresponding header versions for the API versioning.

That's irrelevant. If you do not copy and distribute the library as
part of the program, then the license of the library cannot affect
the right to copy and distribute the program. Copyright law does not
care that a program needs a certain version of a library to work
correctly, because copyright law does not care whether or not a
program works at all. It's only copying and distribution that count.

> It is a quite special case to explicitly load a shared executable (and
> call its entry points) for which not particular headers were used in the
> preparation of the binary.  I do not even know the library/system call
> for that.

That the text of a program contains indications that the program
will use certain libraries in certain ways is generally irrelevant
to the copyright status of the program. There is generally only one
way to express within the text of a program that the program will
use elements of a library, and therefore that expression is not
copyrightable because it lacks originality as defined by copyright
law - see the Lexmark printer cartridge case
<http://www.mwe.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/publications.nldetail/object_id/e9bc6a89-03dc-4e37-9dba-d3d324d6a94c.cfm>.

To put it more simply, that the program contains "#include "joe-lib.h"'
and 'JOEbits jb;' and 'JOEjob(jb, "hello");' does not generally cause
the text of the program to fall under the copyright of the JOE library,
nor does it cause the compiled binary which dynamically links to the
JOE library to fall under the copyright of the JOE library.