[teddyh]

As far as I understand it, Richard Stallman has gotten his view about linking from FSF’s lawyers, who has advised the FSF about what does and does not count as a “derived work”, in the sense of US copyright law.

If you want to argue that the FSF’s lawyers are wrong, please provide more detailed, and hopefully referenced, arguments (as opposed to plain assertions).

[abigail95]

FSF has opinions but not case law - anyone else's opinion is as valid, there's no citation because no court has ruled that dynamic linking is or isn't a derivative work.

You have to construct your own view based on existing statute and vaguely related cases.

Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021) is not a pro-FSF opinion.

Whether linking (dynamic or not) is a derivative work is defined by things like incorporation, similarity, and creative expression.

I think the FSF view is unreasonably confident in its public opinions where the current law is that each potential infraction is going to be decided on a case by case basis. Read 17 USC 101 for yourself and square that with FSF/Stallman opinions.

There's too much nuance to have a stance about what happens when you link a program. "It depends" is the only thing you can say.

[fsckboy]

>Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021)

does not apply to the linking of GPLed code. Google copied just the application programming interfaces and then supplied their own code that they wrote themselves.

if you link to a GPL library you are including their copyrighted code, even if the API that GNU uses did not originate with them but came from POSIX or similar.

[immibis]

until you actually sue them, all you have are guesses, and you miss all shots you don't take

[SpicyLemonZest]

I would point towards Oracle v. Rimini, where the Ninth Circuit has specifically ruled (inside a complex and yet-unresolved case) that a system built to interoperate with a copyrighted program does not constitute a derivative work of that program. (https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/12/16/2...)

They reference a less on point but better known case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin...., for some reason you have to manually add the period at the end of the link) about whether NES cheat cartridges were copyright infringement. If a work that directly links to and interoperates with a program is a derivative work of that program, the Game Genie really was illegal after all. To me that doesn't seem right, and given the FSF's general opinion on console restrictions (https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2025/winter/new-nintendo-drm-ba...) I kinda feel like they'd have to agree.

[RunningDroid]

> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin...., for some reason you have to manually add the period at the end of the link)

On some sites it's possible to work around this type of linkification bug by percent-encoding the last character (percent symbol followed by 2 hex digits representing the ASCII character):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin...

[fsckboy]

i don't see how either of those cases applies to the FSF and GNU's attitude on library linking; in neither case were they creating a combined derivative work.

if I make an ai driven viewscreen that you can stick your paperback book into and it gives you a better reading experience of the book, your paperback book is still in there and you can take it out. My viewscreen may not work without the book, but it hasn't merged/modified the book with anything.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I guess I would say that you've illustrated the problem precisely. Dynamically linking to a GPL library in your program clearly does not combine your program with the library: the library's still there, you can see the .so/.ddl file sitting separately on your computer, it hasn't been merged with your program and your program didn't modify it. Yet the FSF still claims it's a combined derivative work.

Am I misunderstanding something about the analogy?

[abigail95]

Galoob is terrible for the FSF because it provides for a program that only exists to enhance another.

That doesn't fit into the dynamic linking absolutists worldview at all.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Ehh, I'm not sure it's fair to call the FSF dynamic linking absolutists. They only care about any of this because they've boxed themselves into a corner. They want to prevent people from writing proprietary wrappers around copyleft programs, but they don't want a license so restrictive that proprietary and copyleft programs are forbidden from interacting, and Freedom 0 means they can't explicitly prohibit a copyleft program from being used for suchandsuch purpose.