RTS and the GPL

Posted Nov 16, 2012 23:46 UTC (Fri) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]

It's not about "the GPL derived work stuff", but the copyright law derived work stuff. No license gets to define derived work (or can apply at all to works that are not derived works, since the author of an original work does not need the permission of the author of anybody else to distribute his original work). That is, whatever FSF or the copyright owner of a work opines about whether, and in which cases, linking constitutes making a derived work is, unfortunately, largely irrelevant.

Now, that is certainly not to say that their opinion would be in my opinion bogus. In fact I find the FSF interpretation of copyright law fairly well founded, even after Oracle v. Google, but it is still in reality fairly unsettled territory.

And while FSF's FAQ re: derived works may not have changed, there certainly has been some case law development (like Oracle v. Google) about what is a derived work and what is not.