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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 02 2012 @ 12:27 PM EDT |
shocking after all this time.
Of course your program will work with another implementation of the API, that is
the whole point of the API.
"do you have the right to require someone else to make a copy of some third
part's copyrighted content without that third part having any say in the matter?
"
Is also mistaken, I have the right to distribute software that I have written,
anyone I give it to has the right to download a GPL library subject to accepting
the license therein, I do not require them to, they just choose to (and in some
cases maybe it was already installed when they installed their OS).
not anonymous OP.
BTW, signing Anonymous posts would make being Anonymous rather pointless.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 02 2012 @ 12:30 PM EDT |
Again, given the context of the article, the point here is that the
API is not the work under copyright, the implementation is. If your code
demonstrably works to spec when linked to the alternate implementation, stub or
not, it is arguably not a derivative of the GPL implementation. If you require
the GPL implementation to be present at runtime then that argument
fails.
The key issue is the distinction between requiring the
functionality of something which the end user can legally obtain, vs being
derivative of it's expressive properties.
If the only part "borrowed" is a
non-expressive, and hence apparently (in the EU) non-copyrightable aspect, then
it would not be a derivate work, so the copyright owner would have no leverage
over the client program. If the copyright owner has already licensed the GPL
code to the end user, where is the violation?
do you have the
right to require someone else to make a copy of some third part's copyrighted
content without that third part having any say in the matter?
A
vendor cannot require something of an end user, they can merely point out facts,
such as "if you want this program to work, you need a library providing these
functions present under this filename"
And in the GPL case, the copyright
owner of the original work has already offered everyone a license to distribute
(which by extension, is to say legally obtain) the work in question - a licenses
which specifically proclaims that it does not restrict usage.
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