Hacker News Reader

Comment by sakjur | Hacker News Reader

The European Commission have published an interesting article disputing the possible viral effect of linking in EU law: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral-l...

It doesn’t practically change much for most developers, but imo it underlines a bit of the challenge of misunderstandings and the complexity around the sharp corners of open source, in particular outside of the US as most licenses were designed in the US by Americans.

View on HN

The conclusion of the article says "[...] so far linking (even statically) is done for interoperability, does not [...]". IANAL but it could mean that linking against a GPL library for interoperability is OK in EU, but it does not mean it's true for general case of linking with GPL libraries.

Interesting opinion but even if the courts will agree it is not relevant because most software is intended to be distributed globally (including at the very least the US market) and will have to comply with most restrictive interpretation of the license.

1. Google has taken the headers from OpenJDK (GPL licensed) into Android ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switch... )

2. USSC claims Google's copying Java headers is fair use.

3. Many jurisdictions does not have a fair use doctrine.

So the question is, do you think Google is infringing the GPL by copying headers into Android, according to the most restrictive interpretation or the most restrictive copyright regime?

I think the unfortunate truth is that, for some reason, only US copyright law seems to matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com