[License-discuss] Intimacy in open source

[Kevin P. Fleming]

I'll echo Luis' comment there; a 'well-defined' interface which has
only one implementation in existence anywhere in the known universe
may very well *not* be a licensing boundary.

On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 3:50 PM Luis Villa <luis at lu.is> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 12:43 PM John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 11:36 AM Gil Yehuda via License-discuss <license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> When I read this, I interpret intimate data communication as the relationship between a database driver and a database. That's the role of a driver -- to have intimate communications with the DB so that your calling application can bind to the driver, not the DB. I'm asking this group: is my interpretation sound?
>>
>>
>> I would interpret it much more narrowly as communication via shared memory: the caller and callee share data structures directly rather than serialized representations of them passed over a pipe of some sort.  A SQLite database is in intimate communication with its driver; most other databases, because they run in separate processes and communicate over sockets, are not.  The FSF's discussion of static and dynamic linking (they consider them equivalent) seems to reinforce this interpretation.
>
>
> John's understanding is also mine; a well-defined interface is not "intimate" in the sense meant here. But not sure I'd want to rely on that if I were a business, of course.
>
> Luis
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