David G. Miller (aka DaveAtFraud) wrote:
Whether it impinges on someone else's rights depends on the licence
(say SCO) grant to those doing the (re)implementation and the rights
(say SCO) actually have. Copyright and a licence to copy are not quite
the same.
Copyright *LAW* is all I care about. IANAL, but based on lots of
reading over at Groklaw, the applicable U.S. copyright law
US law has no standing here, or in Europe....
If, on another hand, I grant you use under the terms of the GPL, then
you are still free to write your software, but if you link your
program with mine (isn't that what the headers are for?), then any
distribution you do must be under the terms of the GPL, and you must
(if asked) produce the source on demand.
And if I distribute my software under a license of my choice and an end
user happens to substitute a GPLed library for the unencumbered
What the user does re my rights is not your concern. However, if the
user violates my rights, that is a concern to me.
library(ies) I used in my development, it is not my problem. Take it up
with the end user. This is precisely why the [L]GPL cannot make viral
demands where options exist. On the other hand, if someone scavenges
say the libraries underlying MySQL or Postgres (or any other significant
GPLed application) to build a competing product, they probably don't
:-) Postgresql is _not_ your best example.
have much of a legal leg to stand on. Sounds like a good reason to make
sure any application I write is POSIX compliant.
When I wrote before, I had in mind this:
http://cygwin.com/licensing.html
According to Red Hat, I can in fact take Postgresql and make changes to
it and distribute only the resultant binaries, keeping my changes secret.
Whether I can build against Cygwin and distribute binaries-only is
altogether another matter, and my best guess is I cannot. Possibly, I
could distribute a bunch of object files for the client to link
together, possibly with GPL-compliant cygwin I provide at the same time.
See first comment. There is also case law (at least in the U.S.) that
says reverse engineering a product falls under what is called "fair use"
even if the EULA forbids it. Mind you, I can't just decompile and
I believe our law explicitly allows reverse engineering, but I'd be
cautions about copying a GPLed header as opposed to reengineering it. As
I said before, your law doesn't apply here, and your precendents may be
considered irrelevant to delibrations in our courts, even if the law is
similar.
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that my lawyer didn't
really understand the situation.
No argument here. My experience is in developing large scale custom
software for paying customers. If the customer is the government, they
get the source code but generally pay for revisions anyway. Private
customers may or may not get the source code and, if they get it, may
have to treat it as copyrighted by my employer at the time. I'm just
the guy who runs a chunk of the development effort.
As to lawyers, you really need a copyright lawyer if things get ugly.
Its sort of like not going to a general practitioner for brain surgery.
It is very complex and very specialized.
On that we agree. In my case, the original development was for a
government department. I had their agreement to further sell it, and
Facom paid for further development which I did and which worked well
enough for their immediate purposes, but it later transpired, not well
enough for actual use:-)
--
Cheers
John
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