> In netuse.lists.linux-kernel you write:
> >If the interfaces
> >standardize, end users will end up mixing GPL'ed and non-GPL'ed components
> >all over the place. There are hints of this in the Windows world already
> >with Microsoft's OLE. Similary things could happen with CORBA in the Unix
> >world.
>
> Actually, this is already happing today, whenever dynamic
> linking is used to load a propietary application and load it on
> a GPLed operating system or whenever a propietary operating
> system loads GPLed code.
>
> The GPL allows you to ship propietary code and it allows a user
> to link that code against GPLed code and use it - just not to
> distribute it in certain situations. Nothing in the GPL prevents
> you from providing a mechanism (a script for example) that
> enables the user to do this linkage without requiring him to
> know about what he is doing. And you may even provide such a
> mechanism as part of the operating system. That's ld.so for you
> (the same ld.so that is temporarily linking your statically
> linked program against a propietary kernel or vice versa to
> enable to use functions such as write(), open() and close()
> without which it would be quite useless. Who cares about call
> mechanisms - trap or jump, it is all the same).
Precisely. Right now, everyone is defining the meaning of the
term "link" on a case-by-case basis. It looks completely arbitrary to me.
> Or look at what happened with Be: They may have infected part of
> their system with GPLed code, but since that system is a highly
> modular microkernel, this infection is not really relevant,
> since the infected component is extremely self-contained.
Who gets to define what is and is not "self-contained"? Be inc?
The module author(s)? The FSF? Nobody at all? My point is that there's
no clear authority in these issues, and this is allowing people to define
away parts of the GPL that they don't like.
Jon
--- 'Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God.' - Scientist G. Richard Seed
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