[MAL]
> Sorry, I got a bit carried away -- I don't want to take it up
> with the FSF, simply because I couldn't care less.
Well, nobody else is able to Pronounce on what the FSF believes or will do.
Which tells me that you're not really interested in playing along with the
FSF here after all -- which we both knew from the start anyway <wink>.
> What's bugging me is that this one guy is splitting the OSS world
There are many people on the FSF bandwagon. I'm not one of them, but I can
count.
> in two even though both halfs actually want the same thing: software
> which you can use for free with full source code. I find that a very
> poor situation.
RMS would not agree that both halves want the same thing; to the contrary,
he's openly contemptuous of the Open Source movement -- which you also knew
from the start.
> [stuff about German law I won't touch with 12-foot schnitzel]
OTOH, a German FSF advocate assured me:
I also tend to forget that the system of the law works different
in the US as in Germany. In Germany something that most people
will believe (called "common grounds") play a role in the court.
So if you knew, because it is widely known what the GPL means,
than it is harder to attack that in court.
In the US, when something gets to court it doesn't matter at all what people
believed about it. Heck, we'll let mass murderers go free if a comma was in
the wrong place in a 1592 statute, or send a kid to jail for life for using
crack cocaine instead of the flavor favored by stockbrokers <wink>. I hope
the US is unique in that respect, but it does makes the GPL weaker here
because even if *everyone* in our country believed the GPL means what RMS
says it means, a US court would give that no weight in its logic-chopping.
>>> Another issue: since Python doesn't link Python scripts, is it
>>> still true that if one (pure) Python package is covered by the GPL,
>>> then all other packages needed by that application will also fall
>>> under GPL ?
> This is very controversial: if an application Q needs a GPLed
> library P to work, then P and Q form a new whole in the sense of
> the GPL. And this even though P wasn't even distributed together
> with Q. Don't ask me why, but that's how RMS and folks look at it.
Understood, but have you reread your question above, which I've said twice I
can't make sense of? That's not what you were asking about. Your question
above asks, if anything, the opposite: the *application* Q is GPL'ed, and
the question above asks whether that means the *Ps* it depends on must also
be GPL'ed. To the best of my ability, I've answered "NO" to that one, and
"YES" to the question it appears you meant to ask.
> It can be argued that the dynamic linker actually integrates
> P into Q, but is the same argument valid for a Python program Q
> which relies on a GPLed package P ? (The relationship between
> Q and P is one of providing interfaces -- there is no call address
> patching required for the setup to work.)
As before, I believe the FSF will say YES. Unless there's also a non-GPL'ed
implementation of the same interface that people could use just as well.
See my extended mxDateTime example too.
> ...
> No. What's viral about the GPL is that you can turn an application
> into a GPLed one by merely linking the two together
No, you cannot. You can link them together all day without any hassle.
What you cannot do is *distribute* it unless the aggregate is first placed
under the GPL (or a GPL-compatible license) too. If you distribute it
without taking that step, that doesn't turn it into a GPL'ed application
either -- in that case you've simply (& supposedly) violated the license on
P, so your distribution was simply (& supposedly) illegal. And that is in
fact the end result that people who knowingly use the GPL want (granting
that it appears most people who use the GPL do so unknowing of its
consequences).
> -- that's why e.g. the libc is distributed under the LGPL which
> doesn't have this viral property.
You should read RMS on why glibc is under the LGPL:
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
It will at least disabuse you of the notion that RMS and you are after the
same thing <wink>.
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