kdelibs and the GPL

[aleXXX]

On Thursday 20 June 2002 15:02, Andreas Pour wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Some further elaboration below.
...
> In the past, I have also been confronted with the (rather creative)
> argument that if something is designed to work with another work, and
> will not work otherwise, it is a derivative work of that other work,
> copyright law concepts and the text of the GPL be damned.  Under this
> (apparently political rather than legal) interpretation, since P is
> designed to be used with MP and (presumably) has no other useful
> purpose, P is a derivative work of all of MP, and hence MP forms part of
> the "complete work" which must be distributed under Section 3 of the
> GPL.

So, let's say a proprietary app uses (i.e. exec, fork, and some simple 
communication via stdin/out) a GPL'd app, and won't work without this GPL'd 
app, this would be the point "designed to work with another work".
Sure, it doesn't link, but the GPL'd app is more or less a core part of the 
commercial project.

If you say "rather creative", does this mean, that this kind of usage 
really doesn't create a copyright problem (at least in europe) ?

At least I could understand this argument quite good.

Bye
Alex