From: mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu (Marc VanHeyningen) Subject: Re: Recent GPL interpretations and Linux (several responses) Date: 6 Jul 1993 16:19:12 GMT
Thus said stodghil@cs.cornell.edu (Paul Stodghill):
>In article <9307060611.AA24791@mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu> rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Richard Stallman) writes
>
>[ Discussion of NeXT's desire to distribute the Objective-C front-end as
> proprietary software, and the FSF's objection. ]
>
> > Note that this is not a matter of copyrighting an interface. The .o
> > files that NeXT planned to release would have used one of the
> > (internal) interfaces of the GNU compiler, but that was *not* what the
> > FSF objected to. Our objection was because the use of these .o files
> > implied linking them with the GNU compiler--the program, not just an
> > interface.
>
>Make the following substitutions in the above quote,
>
> linking -> loading
> .o -> a.out
> GNU compiler -> Linux
>
>Now read it.
I assume the FSF wouldn't claim this, though I suspect it's a matter
of pragmatics rather than principle. There's a lot of good GPL code,
but not so much that nobody would ever want to run anything else.
To take another interesting case, suppose Sierra On-Line were to
produce something like the above statement, but with substitutions
more like:
.o -> modification/patch
linking -> applying
GNU compiler -> <replace with computer game of your choice>
This would suggest that producers of computer games (depending how
they write their license) could be completely within their rights to
sue people who distribute the "cracks" which circumvent the "enter
word 5 of page 16" type crud that some games do (which is done widely
on various newsgroups and FTP sites.) True?