Linking restrictions and shared libraries

[David Johnson]

On Tuesday March 13 2001 03:51 am, Carter Bullard wrote:
> Has the GPL every taken anyone to court?

No. However, several parties have been "threatened" with legal action in the 
past.

If you were to link a non-GPL application to a GPL libraries owned by the 
FSF, you would first be requested to cease. Then you would be requested by 
the FSF lawyers to cease. If you were stuborn and did not cease, I have no 
doubt it would lead to legal action.

In all the conflicts over the GPL that I am aware of, a settlement or 
understanding was made before it ever reached court. In the objc case, the 
FSF convinced NeXT to GPL its Objective C front end. In the recent case of 
Corel LinuxOS, the author of libapt (?) offered a specific exception allowing 
a GPL application linking to GPL libapt to also link to the (then) non-GPL Qt 
library.

-- 
David Johnson
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