Re: Questions

[Xavier Bestel <n0made free fr>]

le mer 05-12-2001 à 21:51, Bill Gribble a écrit :
> On Wed, 2001-12-05 at 14:09, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> > I asked these same questions of an intellectual property lawyer nearly
> > ten years ago. After some confusion, a fairly clear answer emerged:
> > the boundry lines lie along address spaces (virtual or not).  Since
> > processes are in different address spaces, there is no contamination.
> 
> I think you're mostly on the right track.  The FSF's GPL FAQ has a 
> pretty practical statement of rules of thumb for this in the "plug in"
> case, which I think is sort of the heart of the matter. 
> 
> >From http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html : 
> 
> Can I use the GPL for a plug-in for a non-free program?
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 
>     If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the
> plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program
> makes no requirements for them. So you can use the GPL for a plug-in,
> and there are no special requirements.
> 
>     If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function
> calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a
> single program, so plug-ins must be treated as extensions to the main
> program. This means that linking the GPL-covered plug-in with the main
> program would violate the GPL. However, you can resolve that legal
> problem by adding an exception to your program's license which gives
> permission to link it with the non-free main program.

Well, it could be easily arged that the Bonobo case isn't the fork/exec
case: this faq was probably written before Bonobo, when a "forknexeced"
prog couldn't communicate much with its parent (it had to setup a kind
of pipe or socket to do so) - same thing for your lawyer's answers.
But with the Bonobo technology, the frontier between a forknexeced and a
mere library is blurred: in both case the Bonobo wrapper allows function
calls and passing of parameters, forth and back. I don't really see the
difference between a library and a Bonobo object, and the Bonobo object
can be in-process or out-process without much change.

Remember, facing a court the deep technical arguments don't count, with
a good lawyer only the "spirit of problem" will do. And I think that a
Bonobo object and its container, intimately linked by many function
calls, may be considered as only one program - exactely like 'ls' and
'libc6.so'.

Now, I don't know if, in a prog+object both GPL, we replace the object
by a proprietary equivalent during runtime, we break something. Hint?