gpl backlash?

[Matthew C. Weigel]

On 28 Jul 1999 bruce at perens.com wrote:

> Let's get back to the frame metaphor. When I put a frame in my web page
> that displays one of your web pages, I never copy your web page. The
> frame is an instruction to the end-user's web browser to load your page
> and format it with my page around it. My page is full of my own ads and
> surrounds your page. Existing copyright law says _nothing_ that would
> prevent me from doing this.

Yup, sounds like fair use to me.

But then, it sounds like what you're arguing is the same thing Apple tried
suing people over way back when -- the look and feel stuff.  

If Norton Commander followed Midnight Commander, for instance, would it have
in any way violated the GPL?  If someone had written a front-end to mc (a
front-end to a fron-tend to a shell, that's really a front-end?!?  I hurt my
head sometimes), and GPL'd it; and then someone else wrote a mc clone to
replace the back-end -- should the clone be GPL'd?

No.  The concepts of linking, and derivative work, *should* be this limited. 
The fact that GPL software can run on top of non-GPL'd software (and hence,
could have been legally distributed before a 100% GPL'd operating system was
a possibility), should clearly show that GPL'd software can run *under*
non-GPL'd software.

On another note, I am getting two copies of every single message going
through license-discuss and it's flooding my email address.  This happened
to me before, so I unsubscribed twice and resubscribed once (just to be
sure), and it's still happening.  In the majordomo messages I've saved I
can't seem to find who to contact, is there an administrator on the list who
can contact me outside the list?  I'd appreciate it.

 Matthew Weigel                                       Programmer/Sysadmin
  weigel+ at pitt.edu                             Operating Systems Advocate
                         http://www.pitt.edu/~weigel