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

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Fri Mar 5 03:36:18 EST 2010


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.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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