Re: Questions

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 12:01:06PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works,
>                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > So, which of these covers merely ulizing another program?
> 
> Duh

Well, it depends on your definition of 'based upon'.  For example a
proprietary xterm replacement might still run bash as a shell.  Does this
constitute infringment?  Or if a proprietary software does:

system ("cp foo bar");

And it is run on a system where cp is a GPLed utility?

This is very close to using an out of process component IMO.

However I'm not claiming knowledge of the Copyright Law.  (Mostly because I'm
not able to fake it enough).  Also really I don't care what proprietary
software must or must not do.  However it does pose a question for non-GPL
compatible free software.

Can such a software use an out-of-process GPL component?  If the component is
not 'required', that is the user does some action to activate it.  Isn't this
sort of like running it in a shell or something.  (Thus I could run a GPL
program from a non-GPL compatible shell).  Also, does the law know the
difference between in-process and out-of-process.  To me it doesn't seem like
such a fundemental difference.  Imagine that you would write an emulator for
linux x86 ELF binaries.  Then if you load the binary into the emulator you're
running it in-process.  The binary itself doesn't know.  So can you run GPLed
code in a non-GPL compatible emulator?  So wouldn't running Linux under
VMware be license infringement?  In terms of logic, copyright law makes
absolutely no sense to me, so perhaps one should not attempt to use logic to
understand it.

I'm rambling, it's 4am.  I don't think I've even managed to offend anyone in
this email so it's not such a good addition to a flamewar.  In any case, I
hope I've at least taken up some time which could have been used more
productively, and wasted some bandwidth.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, 
   but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
                       -- Winston Churchill