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Authored by: mtew on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 01:36 PM EDT |
Hmm. What exactly do we have here?
If APIs are copyright-able then the (L)GPL can be used to protect them. All
aspects of the API must then be exposed to be protected. Additions have to be
exposed and open. The main loss is that non-open APIs can be encumbered.
If APIs are not copyright-able, then there is no need for the GPL to protect
them. An open API will expose all its aspects. Secret extensions need not be
exposed, but could not be protected, so anybody who wants to use the secret
extension could expose it and copyright could not be used to prevent that. On
the other hand, _any_ API could be opened in the same way.
The up-chain posting that was so gleeful about prospectively not being able to
GPL APIs was wrong. You can (and should) (L)GPL a project with an API. The API
part would not be copyrighted since APIs would not be copyright-able, but the
API could not be closed or encumbered, and that is the intent of the (L)GPL.
So, an API in an (L)GPLed package can and should stay there. All the rest of
this is fairly minor details.
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MTEW[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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