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

[minh thu]

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.

Cheers,
Thu