On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 09:53:58AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
But I think this goes to the heart of your question of whether the
GPL
is stonger than file-based copyright. Today, someone could take a
GPL'ed program, and rip out some GPL'ed functions, and create a new
GPL functions which exported their functionality over an RPC layer.
Now suppose the RPC server is ACL'ed so it only listens to processes
running on the local CPU, and it is used by a proprietary program to
call these GPL'ed functions.
Sorry, for clarity, this should have read, "and create a new GPL'ed
program"...
- Ted
This is essentially the same thing you could do with code under the
LGPL, or under a file-based copyright, in terms of the practical
effect. Would such an approach stand up in court as being compliant
to the letter of the requirements of the GPL? I'm not a lawyer.
OTOH, would it cause hundreds of slashdot kiddies to stand up and
flame a company that tried to do that, and perhaps DDOS their servers?
Quite possibly.
So regardless of whether from a legal perspective there might be any
practical different, the social understanding of a file-based versus
the GPL'ed so-called "strong copyleft" is quite strong.
Regards,
- Ted