Re: gtkmm capabilities

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Roel Vanhout <roel riks nl> writes:

> Ole Laursen wrote:
>> Yeah, but you are sort of assuming that the guy asking here would only
>> want to use a license that forbids reverse engineering.
>
> Well I was assuming that he wanted to use a 'standard' commercial
> licence, ie one that does forbid it. I can't speak for the OP of
> course, it's just that I think that most people wouldn't even think
> about putting in a clause about reverse engineering in their licenses.

Do you mean that they would put in this clause or not? If you don't
have a clause about reverse engineering in your license then there's
no problem, right? So the problem is not that hard to fix.

Besides, it is even legal to forbid people to reverse engineer an
application? It sounds dubious to me, at least outside USA.

>> I don't get it. Why liability? What does fair use have to do with
>> liability?
>
> The liability in case is that using an LGPL library in a commercial
> product without knowing exactly what the legal consequences of that
> are opens a software publisher up to claims of copyright infringement.
> I'm not even insinuating that any of the current copyright holders to
> the gtkmm code would do that (as long as those publishers would follow
> what those developers consider 'fair use' of the code) but that is
> only based on _trust_ of said developers. While of course in business
> land, the first rule is "trust no one" ;) Especially not in cases like
> this that could cost (a lot of) money.

OK, I get your point now. Although most things always boil down to
trust at some point - you are also trusting them to provide you with
code that does not blow up your machine.

>>>Plus, saying that the GPL hadn't been court-tested until last year
>>>isn't FUD; it's only FUD if you imply that it wouldn't stand up.
>> Yep, and that's what you did. :-)
>
> No, I said the _L_PGL hasn't been court-tested, and I meant in
> relation to the specific issue of statically linking with proprietary
> apps; and in this specific case, I do indeed have doubts on the
> wording of the LGPL. It is not clear enough to be able to say up front
> what a judge will decide in this case. So if I were a lawyer advising
> a client on this issue, I would advise against it, just to be on the
> safe side.

OK, the problem here was probably the wording - I agree with you that
if the proprietary license forbids reverse engineering and you
statically link with a LGPL library, then you are in muddy waters.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.aau.dk/~olau/