Assistance/advice in choosing a license for POV-Ray 4.0

Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M. roddixon at cyberspaces.org
Mon Nov 14 15:40:00 UTC 2005


Your answer is incomplete.  The critical legal question you did not answer 
is: a derivative work of what (or which work)? 

Rod
------------
Rod Dixon
www.cyberspaces.org

...... Original Message .......
On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 03:46:26 -0200 Rodrigo Barbosa 
<rodrigob at suespammers.org> wrote:
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>On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 08:57:10AM +1100, Chris Cason wrote:
>> So the question is - does dynamic linking result in a derivative work ?
>> It seems to me that the answer must be 'no'. (If it were 'yes' it would
>> raise interesting questions on the Windows platform, where it is common
>> to have third-party libraries hooked into the OS in such a way as to
>> cause your app to unknowingly load them).
>
>IANAL etc etc.
>
>It really depends.
>
>You see, for you to dynamicaly link some code, you need to make
>references to it on your own code, so the linker can know how to
>hook to the functions inside the dynamic library.
>
>So, as you can see, you are doing more than simply linking to the
>library. 
>
>(C + Linux follows)
>
>When I write a program that will use zlib, I need to both link
>against libz (-lz) and include its header (#include <zlib.h>).
>So even if the library isn't inside my code, its header is.
>And since the header is part of the library, it is covered by
>its license.
>
>At least in that case, I'm 100% it will constitute a derivative
>work. That is why many libraries (libc etc) as licenses under the LGPL.
>
>On the other hand, the dietlibc library is licensed under the GPL. So
>if you are linking against it, your code MUST also be licensed under
>the GPL (or compatible license etc etc).
>
>Best regards,
>
>- -- 
>Rodrigo Barbosa <rodrigob at suespammers.org>
>"Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur"
>"Be excellent to each other ..." - Bill & Ted (Wyld Stallyns)
>
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