On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Ryan Lane <rlane32(a)gmail.com> wrote:
See the gnu faq on this:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL
If you link, you must use a GPL compatible license.
Yes, but that's not specific to linking. Nothing in the license
proper distinguishes between linking and similar ways of combining two
programs. The FAQ's answers discuss linking because that's what the
FAQ's questions ask, not because linking is different from other types
of combining. (Probably it only mentions linking because the authors
of the FAQ were mainly familiar with compiled code.)
I don't think we actually disagree on this, though.
MediaWiki extensions aren't necessarily a
derivative work. I'd argue
that they fall within the "borderline case" described in the faq:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins
No need to go through this again though, the thread you linked to
already showed that it isn't conclusive either way.
Right. If we care, which apparently we don't, we'd need to ask
Wikimedia's lawyers for an official opinion.
See my first link to the gnu faq. It isn't that
linking isn't allowed,
it's that code that directly links to it would need to be licensed in
a compatible way. If I link to the library with a python wsgi shim,
the shim itself needs to be GPL, but applications accessing the http
wsgi interface would not need to be.
Oh, sorry, I should have looked up wsgi before I replied. :) Yeah,
if you make a shim that parses things in response to an HTTP request,
users of the HTTP interface don't necessarily have to be licensed
GPL-compatibly according to any position I know of.