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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical that there's a coherent legal distinction to be drawn between using a dynamic library with dlopen etc and running a similar executable with arguments. It's functionally identical usage of some public interface.

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Agreed, I am very skeptical too. I have a long time believed that dynamic linking vs running an executable with arguments will be regarded the same in a court. So either both are derivative works or neither.

My personal belief is that a court will only care about if your code is a wrapper (e.g, libgpg) or if it is its independently useful and just uses the library (e.g. PostgreSQL using libreadline) for a small part of its operation. But I am not a lawyer and this has not been tested in court as far as I know.

They don't seem to claim there is a distinction on the mechanics there? Rather their distinction seems to be "are these part of the same overall program, or two separate ones", however you measure that: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins

By claiming that using dlopen to load some code makes your program a derivative work of the library it's using, but shelling out to it doesn't, they're implicitly making a claim as to the distinction of the mechanics.

This has always been my perspective as well, but it goes against long-established norms—for example, it's for exactly this reason that the LGPL was created. I don't think either theory has been thoroughly tested in court, though. See https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ for a countervailing position from the SFC and FSF.

License holder grants you permission to do Foo, but not Bar. For example, it may be legal to show a film at site A (e.g. Netflix), but not at site B (e.g. YouTube), because the license holder said so. Functionality of both sites are almost identical.

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