Re: [Haskell-cafe] GPL answers from the SFLC (WAS: Re: ANN: hakyll-0.1)

2010/3/5 Magnus Therning :

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 18:05, Stephen Tetley wrote:

...

Hi Tom

Hmm, its seems I'm due to eat my hat...

To me though, the judgement makes that insistence that using an API is making a derivative work. I can't see how that squares up.

That has, AFAIU, been the intention of the GPL all along. See e.g. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

It also explains why there has been a discussion in the Linux kernel community about closed source drivers (e.g. nvidia).

The LGPL was, AFAIU, written to explicitly allow a shift of license at the API level. Without the insistence you point out, GPL and LGPL would be pretty much the same license.

I don't see how what you say is related by the link you provide. They say there is an advantage to make a library GPL when there is no alternative so program using the library is required to be GPL too. As an example, they licensed the C library LGPL because they were already other available C library, so making their one GPL licensed could not really drive more programs to be GPL. Indeed the boundary of a library is its API but that hardly translates to say that the GPL covers the API. Cheers, Thu