Re: [MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: help on libmpdemux usage (Modifié par Jérôme Cornet)

Jérôme Cornet jerome at aldorande.net
Tue Jan 13 21:18:01 CET 2004


Le 13 janv. 2004, à 20:18, D Richard Felker III a écrit :
>
> Not at all. Someone is perfectly free to make a plugin for a
> proprietary system out of GPL code for their own private use, but the
> GPL does not give them permission to distribute this derived work
> since it is linked (even dynamically) to proprietary code.

That's the kind of debate i very dislike. So, in your point of view, i 
cannot
make a GPL application for MacOS X itself, since the application is 
linked
"dynamically"  to operating system's libraries. Whatever happens if we 
add
link to GPL libraries installed in the system then??

Sure i am trying to do the right thing and not to steal any code, but i 
don't feel
happy with that kind of answer :-(

As a MacOS X user, i am accustomed to a mix of closed/open source. Let's
take some examples : MacOS X comes built-in with Windows File Sharing,
a web server, a print server and a web browser called "Safari".

Windows File Sharing is done using Samba open source server. Web server 
is
apache and the print server is CUPS. Those component are released and 
installed
as part of MacOS X which is proprietary (except the base system which 
is under BSD
style license) but they were created (and released) originally under 
GPL.
Safari relies heavily on KHTML also released under GPL. (just choose 
"Credits" from
te Help menu to see GPL). Safari is proprietary.

I am not a lawyer too, but i think i am right and don't like the quick 
thinking about
"is there anything proprietary/not GPL you don't have the right to use 
our code".
Maybe Linux is using BIOS code under x86 hardware (i don't know...) but 
BIOS is not
GPL so you couldn't release Linux under GPL or use anything which is 
GPL in it??

Too bad.

Regards,

Jérôme



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