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There 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 infringeme
by caf 14y ago
There 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.