Licensing question (GPL or LGPL) (Ben Finney)

[Wim De Smet]

On Wed, 6 Jul 2005 10:03:02 +1000
Ben Finney <ben at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>...
> It all comes down to whether your work is a "derivative work" of some
> else's, e.g. the Flext code. If so, you're not the sole copyright
> holders in the derivative work and must comply with the license under
> which you received that code.
> 
> Writing a program which links to a library is generally held to be
> making a derivative work of that library, thus the combined program
> must satisfy all license terms when you perform an act covered by
> copyright.
> 
> In short: though you've written the program, you've based it on
> someone else's work (the library), thus it's a derivative work, thus
> their license terms apply to your distribution.
> 

That's kind of a narrow interpretation of derivative work. Derivative
work in the copyright sense is usually interpreted a lot more narrow.
E.g. a wrapper around a library is a derivative work (since it adds
nothing), a program which uses among others a library to reach its
intended goal is not always a derivative work. I'd look at this on a
case by case basis and not use the interpretation used in the GPL faq,
which is IMHO faulty. I'm just contributing this to urge the OP to talk
to a lawyer, and perhaps to the copyright holders of the GPL'd library
since in court it can sometimes matter what the intent of the
copyright holder is with respect to the licensing.

greets,
Wim