Re: [gentoo-project] Bad license and attribution by ChromiumOS and CoreOS

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>>>> On Sun, 22 Mar 2015, Jeroen Roovers wrote:
>
>> Better yet, you can claim copyright on a "compilation" which is
>> probably what is effectively being done here. This is how people get
>> away with defending their copyright on publications of (slightly
>> modified/ abridged/ annotated, if at all) "compilations" of
>> centuries old works. Because copyright law.
>
> It doesn't work like this in our case. The Portage tree is licensed
> under the GPL-2. If someone takes a subset of ebuilds from it, it will
> be a "derivative work" and it cannot be distributed under any license
> other than the GPL-2.

That is true for the ebuilds that were copied/modified.  It isn't
necessarily true for other stuff stuck in the same tarball.

>
> It is even doubtful if any third-party ebuilds added to such a tree
> could be under a different license. If such ebuilds inherit from a GPL
> licensed eclass or depend on (or are depended on by) other ebuilds,
> they cannot "be reasonably considered independent and separate works
> in themselves".
>

That has been a longstanding argument with the GPL (you can link with
the LGPL under a non-free license, but not with the GPL).  However, it
has never actually been tested in court and I'm not convinced that it
will actually stand up.  The only content of the library/eclass/etc
that is present in the "derived work" are the names of symbols and the
name of the eclass and copyrighting those seems a lot like SCO arguing
that they can copyright signal enums.  They don't even get commingled
when you run the program - each gets loaded into its own set of memory
and the linker just fills in some memory addresses.

I'd think a judge would be as likely as not to say that the GPL would
only apply to the library itself, and that you could link whatever you
want to that library under any license at all, and that effectively
there is no distinction between the GPL and LGPL.  That is, if you get
the sort of judge who wouldn't give the win to SCO.

-- 
Rich