Dynamic and Static Linking

[David Johnson]

On Tue, 04 Apr 2000, Martin Konold wrote:

> Ok, imagine a simple case: MS asks you to not use any of their components
> in order to figure out how their file formats are working. Are you (maybe
> you are a GPL Office Suite developer) accepting this?! 

Now you're asking me to choose between the lesser of two evils! If I
have the moral right to infringe upon their wishes and follow the
license and the law, then it is also my moral right to infringe upon
the wishes of GPL developers and read the strict letter of their
license. But if I am not allowed to do something with GPLd code because
of the author's wishes, then neither am I allowed to reverse engineer a
component that MS doesn't want me to.

> Another example: A lot of MS programmers hate if they are bothered by
> insecurity news. Are you claiming that "because these authors do not want
> you to use their work" in order to figure out the weaknesses of their
> implementations you are not going to use their programs/components?

Everything in moderation! Please!

I remember it was a year ago when some indignant Debian developer said
I was pretty low and scummy for saying that the GPL allowed
dynamic linking. "What about what I want!" he said unselfishly and
in the interest of community software. I've thought about his rude
statement since then and have come to the conclusion that respecting
an author's wishes is good rule of thumb, but not an absolute principle
of behavior.

-- 
David Johnson...
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