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

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 08:55, minh thu wrote:

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.

Ah, I might have misunderstood the whole thread then. I thought the discussion was about using the API of a GPLd library. While your comment suggests it's actually about re-implementing a GPLd library, making it API compatible, and releasing the re-implementation under another license. In that case wouldn't a project like Harmony (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_toolkit) be problematic? So would editline's mode for compatibility with readline, right? (GNU TLS would probably not get in trouble for providing an OpenSSL compatibility layer though.) /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe