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If APIs cannot have copyright, the GPL is partially moot | 697 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
If APIs cannot have copyright, the GPL is partially moot
Authored by: kjs on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 05:38 PM EDT
do you want to troll or are you just clueless????

This has nothing to do with GPL and copyright protection.
API's are required and until today nobody assumed they are copyright protected
as they are a collection of facts like a phone book.
The real juice is in the program code and that's very well protected by
copyright laws all over the world (including the EU where the court has decided
that you can not have copyright on API's).

>kjs

---
not f'd, you won't find me on farcebook

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

If APIs cannot have copyright, the GPL is partially moot
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 06:03 PM EDT
No, you are woefully mistaken.

The GNU Public License is used to protect the copyright of implementations, not
the public interfaces of those implementations.

Consider a library licensed under the GPL. All the source code is covered by the
GPL. The API is described by the public header files, and those files have never
been considered copyrightable.

It really is this simple. Using those public header files in your own code has
never been considered a copyright violation thus far. (This assumes that the
public header files contain only the API, the interfaces and items necessary to
use/interoperate with the library, not inlined code. Most programming languages
make that distinction a bit fuzzy.)

If I create a very complex library that has hundreds of functions you can call,
and license it under the GPL, you -- or anyone else -- can still create a
compatible library by using the same public header files (necessary to get
compatible implementations), and pick any license you want. This is the way it
should be, because anything else is protecting an idea, which would be a death
blow to innovation.

What you cannot do, is take my implementation, and claim it as yours.

You can, and should be, allowed to take just the outward interface, the public
API, and use it to make your own implementation compatible with mine.

What Oracle is saying is that since part of the libraries Google provides for
Android have similar interfaces to Sun/Oracle Java, Google should pay billions
to Oracle. It really makes no sense.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

If APIs cannot have copyright, the GPL is partially moot
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 07:17 PM EDT
This has been discussed over and over in the comments here and elsewhere the
past couple of days at least.

GPL depends on copying, modifications and "linking". With new code
where it is not a copy of GPL code (technically this is not "new" :p),
and is not a modification of GPL code, and is not "linked" with GPL
code, it is not a derivative work of the GPL code. This is why some have
commented that in cases where "linking" doesn't apply, there isn't
much difference between GPL and MPL from a file by file basis derivative works
point of view (though there are other differences).

This has nothing to do with API. It has always been the case that GPL does not
restrict reimplementation of any API. Otherwise you wouldn't see many compilers
that were not licensed under the GPL having GCC compatibility as a feature (both
in ABI and command line parameters) like icc, llvm+clang or EKOPath (they only
re-licensed under the GPL recently), or see GLIBC compatibility in other libc
implementations (glibc originated functions, note that when applied to API, LGPL
is no different from GPL), or see Bash compatibility in other shells that are
not licensed under the GPL, ...etc

So why do some people seem to think GPL needs API copyright to be effective? I
suspect that it is the misunderstanding that GPL is supposedly "viral"
(whatever that means :p), makes one think that API copyright is what GPL is
depending on. When in actual fact, GPL only requires a similar compatible
license on works that are considered derivatives. If it is not a derivative work
(not copy, not modification, not "linking"), GPL does not apply.

However, if API is copyrightable, then most copyright license being used on
software right now suddenly become super powerful. This will include GPL, MPL,
BSD, Apache, and almost all other open source and proprietary licenses. GPL and
MPL will apply wherever the API is reused (since it is considered a
"copy"). BSD with advertising clause will require advertising wherever
the API is reused. Apache license patent grant will apply whenever the API is
reused (I'm not sure if many of the companies that contributed to Apache will
agree to this :p). Current proprietary licensed software will most likely be
completely unusable legally specially when it interacts with other "license
incompatible" software and/or hardware (which in our world, almost all the
time XD).

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

not even slightly n/t
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 07:24 PM EDT
...see you under the bridge

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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