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Authored by: IMANAL_TOO on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 05:44 PM EDT |
My understanding is that GPL relies on copyrights.
If the APIs cannot be copyrighted, they may end up in public
domain i guess, becuase if the APIs cannot be copyrighted
then they cannot end up in GPL.
No, I was not trolling.
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IMANAL
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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 08 2012 @ 04:03 PM EDT |
If the API's cannot have copyright, then there would be no point in having the
GPL and LGPL as separate licences.
The protection of the GPL essentially comes from copyright.
The LGPL is typically used for libraries, where you say "here, this is a
GPL library, but providing you just access it via the API, then thats fine, your
code is not necessarily GPL as well" .. because, effectively, they are
relaxing the copyright restrictions to make the API available without
copyright.
The only real difference with the GPL is that you cannot access GPL code, even
via its published API from non GPL code. You can't ship a GPL library next to
your non-GPL product and say "hey, its OK, we only access the library
through its API, the header files we used are de-minimis" because the GPL
police will be down on you like a ton of lead.
Its happened. Often. So to suddenly find the Free Software movement shouting
"hey, API's have never been copyright protected" when for many many
years they have been taking axactly the opposite stance in the difference
between LGPL and GPL software is a little confusing.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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