Re: Gtk+ Commercial Applications (Licencing Issues)

[Andreas Bombe <andreas bombe munich netsurf de>]

On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 08:39:40AM +0200, Robert Schwebel wrote:
> "Robert G. Brown" wrote:
> > http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/copyleft.html
> 
> That's all clear to me, but the initial question was: is linking a
> proprietary program to a GPLed library a "derived work" or is it not? In
> former times I was pretty sure that it is, but I remember a long
> discussion where everybody told me that it is common interpretation of
> the GPL that just linking is _not_ a derived work. Otherwise every
> program that uses kernel functions (which are under the GPL) would have
> to be open sourced and no commercial software would be possible on Linux
> systems. 

Linking is derived work.  The Linux kernel example does not apply, see
the Linux COPYING file:

|   NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
| services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
| of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
| Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
| Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
| kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
|
|                        Linus Torvalds
|
|----------------------------------------
|
|                    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
|                       Version 2, June 1991
[snip rest of GPL]

-- 
    Andreas E. Bombe <andreas.bombe@munich.netsurf.de>
    http://home.pages.de/~andreas.bombe/
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