[DB-SIG] Re: [Psycopg] GPL or LGPL

[Magnus Lycka]

At 10:37 2002-10-02 +0200, Federico Di Gregorio wrote:
>those lines gets *interpreted* by emacs (i.e., it generate instructions
>to drive a process, something very similar to python bytecode, isn't
>it?)

The fact that there seems to be a number of
grey zone issues and dilemmas concerning GPL
doesn't mean that I can't loose a court case
involving GPL. It probably just means that the
lawyers will charge more money from both
sides...

Note that the GPL says:

"Activities other than copying, distribution and
modification are not covered by this License; they
are outside its scope. The act of running the Program
is not restricted, and the output from the Program
is covered only if its contents constitute a work
based on the Program (independent of having been
made by running the Program). Whether that is true
depends on what the Program does."

The issue is whether your code and the GPL
program can be considered to combine into a new
program. I doubt that anyone would say that a
text file with emacs editor directives is a
program at all.

The issue is that if I write a program that imports
a number of modules, these modules are from a logical
and practical point of view part of the whole program.
My code won't work without them.

I think you know that RMS was unhappy with the Python
license, and that it was changed so that it became
GPL compatible, i.e. it became possible to use code
licensed under the Python license in a GPL application.

With the old incompatible licence RMS seems to have
considered it impossible to write GPLed python programs,
since the Python interpreter and the standard library
modules become part of the total program.



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