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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RE[6]: I don't know that Europe is friendly territory
by dylansmrjones on Fri 4th May 2012 11:29
in reply to "RE[5]: I don't know that Europe is friendly territory"
Member since:2005-10-02
Member since:
2008-10-30
Do you even know what dynamic linking is?
There is no code from the library included in the final binary that is not in the header files (in almost all cases).
So are you saying that it is possible to dynamically link against GPL code?
Anyways GPL header files are normally full of copyright and license information, are you saying that GPL projects should remove this superfluous information since they are misrepresenting copyright and now breaking EU law by including it?
The obvious conclusion is of course that if an API is not copyrightable then it must be legally ok for a non GPL project to dynamically link against a GPL project, and on a side note, it must be legally ok to make linux kernel modules that are not GPL and distribute these (as non GPL code).