Comment by abigail95
1 month ago
FSF has opinions but not case law - anyone else's opinion is as valid, there's no citation because no court has ruled that dynamic linking is or isn't a derivative work.
You have to construct your own view based on existing statute and vaguely related cases.
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021) is not a pro-FSF opinion.
Whether linking (dynamic or not) is a derivative work is defined by things like incorporation, similarity, and creative expression.
I think the FSF view is unreasonably confident in its public opinions where the current law is that each potential infraction is going to be decided on a case by case basis. Read 17 USC 101 for yourself and square that with FSF/Stallman opinions.
There's too much nuance to have a stance about what happens when you link a program. "It depends" is the only thing you can say.
>Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021)
does not apply to the linking of GPLed code. Google copied just the application programming interfaces and then supplied their own code that they wrote themselves.
if you link to a GPL library you are including their copyrighted code, even if the API that GNU uses did not originate with them but came from POSIX or similar.
until you actually sue them, all you have are guesses, and you miss all shots you don't take