[License-discuss] GPL and proprietary WebAPIs

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Tue Dec 27 16:18:51 UTC 2011


Clark C. Evans scripsit:

> Does the GPL prevent the distribution of M if the work it relies upon,
> P, isn't compatibly licensed?

Web browsers "rely on" web servers to provide most of their function
(take it from someone who was recently cut off from the Internet for
three whole days), and also on the entire Internet infrastructure of
routers and so on.  Most of this infrastructure, and many web servers,
runs proprietary software, but nobody argues that a GPLed web browser
can legally interact only with GPLed servers using GPLed infrastructure.

-- 
My corporate data's a mess!                     John Cowan
It's all semi-structured, no less.              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    But I'll be carefree                        cowan at ccil.org
    Using XSLT
On an XML DBMS.



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