Re: gEDA-user: firmware and the GPL license

[DJ Delorie <dj@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The GPL is based on the legal concept of a "derived work".  If you
partition the code, it only isolates the GPL'd code if the two parts
are not considered one work.  Note that this is a legal
interpretation, not a technical one, and depends on your intentions as
well as your design.  So, if you create some mythical interface
between two pieces of co-dependent code for the sole purpose of
evading the GPL, you haven't evaded it, because the two pieces of code
still need each other to function and thus are not independent.

A suitable API would be something that *is* intended to allow for
arbitrary expansion, or if there are GPL equivalents for both sides,
such as the Linux syscall ABI or GIMP plugins, or if the API follows
some previously published API, such as an i2c bus.


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