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From: | Anthonys Lists |
Subject: | Re: Lilypond \include statements and the GPL |
Date: | Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:41:57 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130307 Thunderbird/17.0.4 |
On 02/04/2013 23:28, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
Think of the API as a looking glass. On one side you have the code that IMPLEMENTS the api. On the other side we have the code that CALLS the api.On 04/03/2013 12:01 AM, Anthonys Lists wrote:But as I understand it, the lawsuit as actually sued said "apis are copyright" and you would have needed a licence to use the apis - to use Oracle's Java.That's exactly in line with what David said. Google were providing a clean-room re-implementation -- the only thing it had in common with Oracle's Java was the API. Oracle couldn't sue on the basis of code duplication, so they tried to stop Google distributing their implementation by claiming copyright violation on the basis of duplication of the API. And (rightly) lost. That's a different situation from the one we have been discussing here, which is code that _uses_ (not implements) functions whose only existing implementation is in a GPL-licensed program.
Correct - Oracle wanted to stop Google writing new code to IMPLEMENT the api (that's what David said).
BUT - iirc what Oracle actually sued over was "using the looking glass". Which would have stopped people writing code that CALLS the api (that's what I said).
And that IS exactly the situation we have with lilypond. Using an api - in either direction - is not copyrightable. So if your lilypond text file calls a GPL lilypond function, it is not subject to the GPL because the api cannot be copyrighted. (If you copy the function *implementation* into your file, of course you then do get caught by copyright.)
Cheers, Wol
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