[Haskell-cafe] GPL answers from the SFLC (WAS: Re: ANN: hakyll-0.1)

[Magnus Therning]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 08:55, minh thu <noteed at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/3/5 Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org>:
>> On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 18:05, Stephen Tetley <stephen.tetley at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi Tom
>>>
>>> Hmm, its seems I'm due to eat my hat...
>>>
>>> To me though, the judgement makes that insistence that using an API is
>>> making a derivative work. I can't see how that squares up.
>>
>> That has, AFAIU, been the intention of the GPL all along.  See e.g.
>> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
>>
>> It also explains why there has been a discussion in the Linux kernel
>> community about closed source drivers (e.g. nvidia).
>>
>> The LGPL was, AFAIU, written to explicitly allow a shift of license at
>> the API level.  Without the insistence you point out, GPL and LGPL
>> would be pretty much the same license.
>
> I don't see how what you say is related by the link you provide.
>
> They say there is an advantage to make a library GPL when there is no
> alternative so program using the library is required to be GPL too. As
> an example,  they licensed the C library LGPL because they were
> already other available C library, so making their one GPL licensed
> could not really drive more programs to be GPL.
>
> Indeed the boundary of a library is its API but that hardly translates
> to say that the GPL covers the API.

Ah, I might have misunderstood the whole thread then.  I thought the
discussion was about using the API of a GPLd library.  While your
comment suggests it's actually about re-implementing a GPLd library,
making it API compatible, and releasing the re-implementation under
another license.

In that case wouldn't a project like Harmony
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_toolkit) be problematic?
So would editline's mode for compatibility with readline, right?

(GNU TLS would probably not get in trouble for providing an OpenSSL
compatibility layer though.)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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