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There is still some debate -- and this case didn't touch it -- over linking and derivative works. Static linking pretty clearly involves something that requires
by ubernostrum 14y ago
There is still some debate -- and this case didn't touch it -- over linking and derivative works. Static linking pretty clearly involves something that requires a license from the copyright holder, but dynamic linking is far from clear. The GPL basically asserts that dynamic linking makes a derivative work, but there's no guarantee that this is how copyright law would actually be interpreted by a court.
- caf 14y agoThere is more to it than just the technical nature of the linking, though - the court would take into account all of the circumstances of the claimed infringement. For example, if you distributed your commercial software packaged up with a GPL library, with scripts or links or whatever designed to have that library loaded together with the commercial binary as part of a finished product, then the "dynamic" nature of the linking might well be considered to be a technical irrelevancy. On the other hand, if you distributed your commercial binary on it's own, and expected your customers to find a compatible library to dynamically link against it, then that might be a different matter.
- ubernostrum 14y agoThe second case is the more common one, and has come up a few times. See, for example, debates over whether code written to a generic readline-esque API must comply with readline's GPL, even though non-GPL alternatives are available.