Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 2nd May 2012 22:32 UTC, submitted by PLan
"The European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that application programming interfaces and other functional characteristics of computer software are not eligible for copyright protection. Users have the right to examine computer software in order to clone its functionality - and vendors cannot override these user rights with a license agreement, the court said." Bravo. A landmark ruling, for sure. If the US courts decide in favour of Oracle in the Google-Oracle case, Europe would instantly become an even friendlier place for technology companies.
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Member since:
2011-06-22
If you only include the header files, but not actually link with the library (or load it as a plugin), then yes, that is ok. A common example of this is the Linux kernel headers. The Linux kernel is GPL, but including the kernel headers from a program does require that program to be GPL, as long as it just runs under the kernel rather than being linked into it.
This is intentional since the header files describe how to interact with the work, which is necessary for components which are not themselves part of the work.