On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 09:06, Sean wrote: > Well it makes sense to me that if you're building a program that > relies on a library, that it is a derived work of that library. [snip] > Yes, there are times when GPL software isn't available. Usually that's > by design, the authors that placed the work under GPL intended it to be > unavailable to people who don't want to abide by the terms of the GPL. > To me that's a good thing and builds incentive into the system for people > to give their improvements back to the authors that created the work in > the first place. > > However, there are many many more instances where proprietary software > is unavailable to people. Which is why I don't really understand your > complaint against GPL software. It provides so much more availability > and freedom than proprietary software does. Proprietary software > might not be available if a company goes out of business for example, > or if they have an exclusive license with another company or about > a million other reasons. I don't understand where you get this idea > that says proprietary software is more available than GPL software. I have not seen you even once even approach the actual criticism presented many times here. Instead, you keep redirecting to the "Don't use GPL'd software if you don't want to abide by the license" straw man. Here, then, is a criticism of the GPL *license*, not of software that uses the license, and not of authors that choose the license. It is the only license of which I am aware that seeks to control the behavior of developers with regard to what *other* licenses are used. By way of illustration, I am creating a program that uses five components: A: a GPL-licensed library B: a LGPL-licensed library C: a proprietary-licence library for which I have only object code, but rights to use and distribute D: a BSD-licensed library E: the main program that I wrote myself and may use/distribute any way I like Only one of these licenses makes any stipulation about what the other licenses are. The rest are agnostic about *other* software; they cover only use and distribution of themselves. As long as I abide by those licenses, they may be mixed together freely. Licence B only demands that the distributor act accordingly with regard to B. Same with C, D, and E. But License A is different in this respect. If I abide by the terms of the GPL then that license demands that all other components also abide by those terms. In the GPL's reckoning, the proprietary library is a derived work of the GPL library. It doesn't matter that the GPL library is for TCP networking and the proprietary library is for low-level access to a video chip. This is the loosest definition of "derived work" that I can imagine. And yet you call it "a confused piece of logic" to point out that it is the GPL that is not integrating well here. C didn't tell the developer that he couldn't use A, it was A that said he couldn't use C. In the real world, developers often don't have a choice about C. But they do have a choice about A. It's unfortunate that developers that might otherwise support free software any way they can end up not being able to at all.
