Re: comparison of public licenses?

On Mon, Jan 24, 2000, Rod Dixon <rod[_at_]cyberspaces.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2000, Nate Puri <natepuri[_at_]office.ompages.com> wrote:
> >
> > What is uncertain is the manners in which copyright will render
> > one or more provisions of the GPL type licenses moot.
>
> I have a narrow disagreement with these assertions.
>
> While whether the GPL or some of its iterations could be enforced is
> an open question, the assertion that derivative works are the copyright
> of the author of the derivative work is dead wrong.

I understand this, but I wasn't clear about the subject matter of what programmers are calling 'derivative.' What I hear most commonly from them is not who owns a derivative, but what is a derivative, where the purported work is not a merging of code (i.e., where the UNIX 'diff' files are merged on a line by line basis with a program that 'patches' code, but where the program is 'compiled against' a 'lib' or library of code, and the resulting compilation is a new work that depends on two separate code bases but is not 'based on' them. I would personally appreciate if someone could clarify the what is and is not derivative in regards to code 'linking.' For example, to complise the Secure Shell ("SSH"), one needs RSAREF library, libc, and the compiler gcc. If I wrote SSH, B wrote libc, C wrote gcc, and R wrote RSAREF, what is legal status of the the binary module named ssh that could not have been compile without the other three dependencies?

These are elusive issues for me....

-nate
__

Nate Puri ("natedawg")		http://www.ompages.com
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