On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 10:22:06AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
What is interesting about the GPLv3 ancestor of the deleted clause is that it appears to avoid the traditional tiresome legal debate about GPLv2, shared libraries and 'derivative works' by instead focusing on what one has to provide as a matter of source code if one distributes (conveys) a binary.
I'll observe if indeed the goal was to bypass the whole question of "derivitive works", then there is the danger that it could change the general understanding of what is and isn't covered in a dramatic fashion. This is because I've heard people "steeped in the FSF interpreative tradition" claim that the GPLv2 should (at least from their moral/ethical calculus) infect across an RPC call. This interpretation had been strictly ruled out because it's clear that a program running on a completely different computer on the other side of a network connection very clearly could not be reached via copyright law due restrictions to what I judge would likely tolerate via-a-vis stretching the definition of derivitive before throwing a lawyer who tried to claim that the GPL infected across an RPC call out of the courtroom.
If we bypass the protections of the common law interpretation of what deritive works mean, then "intimate data flow" could easily be interpreted to include non-copyleft-next source code which tries to call copyleft-next code across a network connection via an RPC, and I think that would be a huge change.
- Ted