Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by qcoh 1944 days ago
From the FAQ, I don't get why the code has to be GPL licensed. It talks about libraries, "entire combinations", "software modules that link" and "work as a whole".

On your second point: Can't they argue that they implement against an API, which could be provided by non-GPL software as well?

1 comments

Compatibility with GPL in this case simply means a software distributed in a compatible license like MIT can be combined and distributed under GPL [0].

>On your second point: Can't they argue that they implement against an API, which could be provided by non-GPL software as well?

I don't think that is reasonable. A GPL program is specifically named in requirements.txt and imported. It's essentially the same as dynamic linking, that is no more than naming a program and using it's API. If this argument was valid one could also argue it's possible to modify a dynamically linked binary's rpath (can be easily done with patchelf on GNU/linux) from a GPL library to a non-GPL one so dynamically linking a library would never require you to do abide to it's license, which is obviously untrue [1].

[0]http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean

[1]http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic