What's "Linking" under the GPL?

Sarkela sarkela at home.com
Fri Nov 2 14:07:50 UTC 2001


Ok, is it possible to distinguish between being free
and the state of freedom? One confusion may be the
overloaded meanings on the word free. Free may imply
use without payment or fee, or it may imply without
constraint. 

In the first sense, GPL is certainly free.
One does not need to pay any "owning" authority
to use, reuse, and change GPL code as long as the
terms of the license are met.

Therein lies the rub. The fact that there is a license
or copy(right|left) means that there is constraint on use.
In my reading of the licenses, it seems that the SqueakL
leaves the reuser with more degrees of freedom.

An unusual quality of the GPL license is that the scope
of its constraint exceeds the boundary of the code
to which it was originally attached. The constraint
is tied to the notion of "linking" and does
indeed have the potential to affect (infect) a body
of code that was developed with no knowledge of the
linked GPL code.

Conclusion, neither is inherently better or more good
than the other. They are both licenses for free software.
SqueakL provides certain degrees of freedom in reuse that
GPL by intention does not. Hence, the reuser must respect
the licensees intention. I suspect this is why RMS et al
came up with the LGPL.

John 

> From: "Andrew C. Greenberg" <werdna at mucow.com>
> Reply-To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 08:16:42 -0500
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: What's "Linking" under the GPL?
> 
> On Friday, November 2, 2001, at 05:29  AM, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
> wrote:
> 
>>> The fact that I can't incorporate a GPL program in Squeak
>>> proves the point.
>> 
>> Well. It proves to me that SqueakL is not GPL compatible.
>> It doesn't prove to me that GPL is "not free".
> 
> Q.E.D.
> 
> There is nothing about Squeak making it non-interoperable with GPL
> software apart from the legal limitations imposed upon the use of GPL.
> I cannot use Squeak, an open source, readily available software program
> that any person can use for most any purpose without constraint, with
> any GPL code.  Which is the "free software?"  By any definition of the
> word "free," at least one proffered outside the FSF website, the answer
> to reasonable people must be clear.  GPL is constrained, not free.  I
> can't use.  It is not free.
> 
> Goran, here, simply defines "free" to mean "subject to GPL," and then
> announces his conclusions therefrom.  I think this putative retort
> proves my point more clearly than anything I might have written.
> 
> P.S.: It isn't just Squeak-L -- this applies to ANY MONOLITHIC IMAGE
> LATE-BOUND SOFTWARE.  Unless the software is relicensable under GPL,
> then the software cannot be used or distributed with GPL software.
> Whatever this is, it is not freedom.
> 
> 
> 





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