derivation

[bruce at perens.com]

From:	Martin Konold <konold at alpha.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de>
> On of the more critiacal points is "referencing" via stuff like corba and
> DCOM. Does this kind of referencing/linking imply the viral clause? 

Hi Martin,

It's clear that you can make _any_code_ a callable object through an object
broker like CORBA or DCOM. Thus, you would have a trivial way to write around
the derivation language in any license, if that license was not allowed to
protect against derivation through an object broker. IMO this is too broad a
loophole.

But then this exists in simpler cases as well. Suppose that someone writes a
proprietary GUI front-end for "dpkg", for example (the Debian packaging
program, which is GPL-ed). The program does nothing but exercise "dpkg". Is it
not a derived work?

But then is my simple shell script that runs "dpkg" a derived work?

There are definitely cases where you _want_ to export an interface for
anyone to use, or at least for _fair_ use. There are other cases where
you're leaving the barn door open for unfair derivation of your program.
Until copyright law catches up to this, I think we have little choice but
to specify details about this more thoroughly in our licenses.

	Thanks

	Bruce