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by moonchild 1946 days ago
The act of linking against a library produces a derivative work of that library. But since APIs are not copyrightable (in europe, at least), the act of using an API does not produce a derivative work, and thus code which uses an API is not bound to any particular license wrt it.
2 comments
40four 1946 days ago
I don’t understand what you mean. You can’t use the API without, in this case, importing it in the python code. That means you bring in a whole copy of the code into your project, or the API wouldn’t work, right?

So, my understanding is the author’s new files that use the GPL licensed library can individually be licensed MIT, but the work as a whole must the GPL.

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oezi 1946 days ago
There is a pretty clear line between using an API and using the code behind it.

The line between an API and code describing and documenting that API is quite fine. See Google vs Oracle.

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moonchild 1946 days ago
> See Google vs Oracle

Google v oracle happened in the us. I explicitly qualified with ‘in europe’. That lawsuit would never have flown in the first place. Oracle's position was specifically that they held the copyright of the java stdlib APIs, which copyright was infringed upon by google.

> code describing and documenting that API

I'm not sure what you mean by that, can you clarify?

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