Qt/Embedded

[David Johnson]

On Monday 13 November 2000 10:58 pm, kmself at ix.netcom.com wrote:

> Besides, the point of the BSD/MIT licenses is to allow this licensing
> transitivity.  You'd similarly not be able to redistribute code derived
> from BSD/MIT terms after combining it with a typical proprietary
> license.

Including the source code is one thing, but dynamically linking to a library 
is a different beast. The typical proprietary license (actually all of them 
that I can think of) place no restrictions on how I can license my own 
application if I dynamically linking to them. That sort of restriction seems 
to be limited to the Open Source world. To be fair however, most proprietary 
libraries have other restrictions that more than make up for their liberalism 
in this area.

> Sorry.  And I can't spell it either, or I might've noticed.
>
> As I understand, the "Independent and separate" language refers to
> programs which don't cross the link-layer boundary.  Though this is a
> bit fuzzy in definition.  Whether you can get away with shipping, say,
> binaries and object files, I'm not sure.  As seperate entities, shipped
> separately, possibly.  Together, probably not.

Is this "link-layer" boundary defined in copyright law? It certainly isn't in 
the GPL. RMS seems to draw his line there, but does he have any concrete 
reasons for drawing it there? (I'm sure he does, I just don't know what they 
are).

But this is getting off topic. All I need to know is my legal standing if I 
distribute two nearly identical BSD licensed packages, one linked to QT/X11 
and the other to Qt/Embedded. As near as I can tell, the only real difference 
between them would be a different library name sent to the linker.

-- 
David Johnson
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