🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <970014@gore.com> jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore) writes:
: I don't know.  I was simply stating FSF's position as I understand it: if
: something needs GPL-covered code to function, it is a derivative of that
: GPL-covered code.

I think it's a ludicrous position.  By that argument, all perl scripts
fall under the GPL until someone else writes a perl interpreter.

The problem is that word "until".  If I consider the perl language (as
an interface, not as a program) as proprietary (I don't), then it's
proprietary whether or not someone has made something else to use that
interface.  If someone else makes one, they're in trouble with me, but it's
still proprietary interface.

Now if I don't consider it proprietary, then it's not proprietary already.
It doesn't become non-proprietary when someone "borrows" the idea.  If
I considered it proprietary, but someone borrows it and the courts tell
me they can, then it wasn't all that proprietary in the first place, unless
I actually gave it to them somehow, on purpose or accidentally.

If you want to make re-implementability a test of whether a particular
interface implies derivation or mere dependency, I suppose you could,
but what we have here is not the test of re-implementability, but the
test of re-implementedness.  If an interface is re-implemented, it
implies a reduction in dependency, but it says nothing about derivation.
In particular, I have difficulty seeing how an object which is MEANT
to provide a set of services, such as an interpreter, or a library,
can have anything derived from it by mere use of those services.

Another problem with using re-implementedness as a test is that it
works the other way around: someone can say, "Since many GPL-covered
routines are re-implementations of code available elsewhere, my code
isn't REALLY dependent on that code, even though I've agregated into
the same text file."

"Mere agregation" is also a very fuzzy concept.  Does this mean that
Berkeley can include perl in 4.4 as long as they don't include any
perl scripts?  But if they include perl scripts, then their distribution
is dependent on perl.  (Or so the argument would go.  I wish to go on
record once more as saying that no perl script falls under perl's copyright.
That's my interpretation of the GPL, and that's what counts, in this case.)

Pretending some interface is proprietary until someone else comes out
with one strikes me the same way as those businessmen who charge what the
the market will bear until a competitor comes along.  That is, I can hardly
blame them, but I know they're not really interested in my happiness...

...and they don't realize that the high price is mostly helping the
competition.  Short-term profits over long-term market share.  Yet again.

Sigh.  Giving away Free Software shouldn't be like selling tickets to
a concert that nobody wants to go to.  Sigh, sigh, sigh.

Larry Wall
lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov