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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: Anonymous on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 06:57 PM EDT
Your teacher was wrong.

The compiler has nothing to do with it - I thought we disposed of the notion of
code being written to a compiler being a derivative work of that compiler (which
seems to be what your teacher suggested) a loooong time ago. Not to mention the
almost certain implied licence (free of the GPL or any other restrictions) if
you obtained the compiler legitimately and use the compiler for the purpose it
was intended - to compile your code.

If you statically link you are copying the library, so you need a licence.

If you dynamically link you are only using the API - which is not copyrightable
anywhere (yet), so there is no issue of needing a licence, any licence,
including the GPL. There is no issue of a derivative work since you are not
copying anything that can be protected by copyright (which is implicit in
declaring something a derivative work).

Any suggestion otherwise is wrong. Period. The only chance this has of being
right (and in the US only) is if Oracle wins on the copyrightability of APIs.

To the extent that any version of the GPL states otherwise, it is going to be
found unenforceable.

Does anyone know if this aspect of the GPL has been tested in court anywhere?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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