A GPL-enforcement suit against VMware

Posted Mar 11, 2015 6:00 UTC (Wed) by bug1 (guest, #7097)
In reply to: A GPL-enforcement suit against VMware by jsanders
Parent article: A GPL-enforcement suit against VMware

If the code cant do "its thing" by itself then it cant be considered an independent work, it must be a derivative of something.

A GPL-enforcement suit against VMware

Posted Mar 11, 2015 11:10 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

That's a rather awkward position, since it immediately raises the question "OK, so what are my C and C++ programs derivative works of?" since they can't do their thing without a language runtime and a CPU.

A GPL-enforcement suit against VMware

Posted Mar 11, 2015 11:22 UTC (Wed) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (1 responses)

Which is why many runtimes/libraries have explicit linking exceptions in their licensing. E.g. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception.html . Most of those specifically prevent the runtime's license to affect the running program.

A GPL-enforcement suit against VMware

Posted Mar 11, 2015 16:20 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

There the resulting executable contains pieces of the runtime/library. The discussion at hand is around the case where there are no direct code inclusions. I.e., is a program written in the C of K&R a derivative of the book, even if no lines of code were copied from the examples?

An interesting case in point is the readline library (GPLed). The FSF claimed any program using its API had to be GPLed, until the BSD-licensed editline library came around, with the same API...