[erlang-questions] A PropEr announcement

[Amy Lear]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 6:18 PM, James Churchman
<jameschurchman@REDACTED> wrote:
> > - the question of what constitutes a derived work is an issue under
> > copyright law and may vary by jurisdiction; it is not up to the author of
> > the license to define that. See for
> > example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Point_of_view:_dynamically_and_static-linking_violates_GPL
> Is this a fact or a stated FSF opinion? seems counter intuitive that
> something that writes to an api ( even if it's dynamically linked ) can be
> considered an alteration of derived work, as what is to stop someone
> producing an identical api with the same, or indeed a different set of
> behaviour, does the existence of this "new" api now change things.
> Better still what if it targets an intermediate api. In that case if all
> calls in your code go to notgplmodule:do() which is a dual licensed
> opensource project, which calls gplv3 code, what happens then??
> James

Magical Things Happen. The tendency for linking to GPL works being
required to be GPL works is a complicated thing that gets contested in
different ways in different places.

Making an intermediate API to present a non-GPL interface to
proprietary code is a pretty well established technique. See: some
video card drivers in Linux, with having a GPL compatible bit that
just creates an interface for the non-GPL compatible bits to later
use.

Making an identical API to an existing GPL based API also complicates things.

>From here, the only correct answer is "Consult a lawyer in your
jurisdiction." Unfortunate, but that's how it goes.