On Thu, 11 Oct 2001, Daniel A. Koepke wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Oct 2001, Patrick Dughi wrote:
>
> > This is in regard to a discussion from a while ago, that I
> > can't even remember.... May have some info for those of you who'd
> > like to create patches, etc, and need to link in GPL'ed software.
> >
> > In brief, 'no you can't *hits you with a stick*'.
>
> Mr. Turner is wrong. Maybe the FSF really intends the GPL to restrict
> this kind of thing, but he's dead wrong if he thinks it can. An interface
> cannot be copyrighted. If you write the code that is making use of the
> interface, the code belongs to you. MySQL can copyright its code and its
> documentation. That doesn't mean they have any rights whatsoever to your
> use of their interface, even if you distribute it.
>
> And that's that.
I guess it depends on your definition of interface. If they wrote
a function 'ConnectToMySQLDatabase', and you called it in your code (even
if you did not include their code/dll/etc), I believe that is not allowed
to be released, any more than it would be to write a GPL'ed patch
containing code hooking directly into Circle structures/routines, despite
not containing the actual code for them.
On the other hand, if you write your own API, and have it connect
to a MySQL database, I doubt that there's any problem with that. No more
than if you wrote a new API to connect to Oracle, or a new API to read the
player file for circle (of course, as long as you did all of them from
scratch).
PjD
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