I have sent a question to FSF about the AT&T legality in this situation. And the answer is interesting. Here it is (I have mistaken GhostScript for GhostView in a hurry):
> A company (AT&T) is distributing their program (GSDjVu) under a free
> but not GPL-compatible license (CPL). The distribution contains only
> the source and has no GPL'd parts. However, the only and intended use
> of this source is to be linked against a GPL'd program (GhostView). Is
> that legal?
No. Please tell the copyright holders of GhostView.
--
-Dave "Novalis" Turner
GPL Compliance Engineer
Free Software Foundation
Ilya
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I wish Dave had elaborated. I can not for the life of me think of anything that would be illegal about it, unless the nature of GSDjVu makes it derived work. Since GhostView does not have an any sort of published API, I would expect the answer would not be as clear cut for a GhostScript as for GhostView.
Bill
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AT&T eventually released the source code for GSDJVU
which is the missing piece for DJVUDIGITAL.
Alas they released under the CPL, a free software license
that is unfortunately incompatible with the GPL.
This makes things a bit akward.
All the information at
http://djvulibre.djvuzone.org/gsdjvu.html.
- Leon Bottou
Great news! I noticed a small typo on the web page though, a missing semicolon in & in AT&T.
I have sent a question to FSF about the AT&T legality in this situation. And the answer is interesting. Here it is (I have mistaken GhostScript for GhostView in a hurry):
> A company (AT&T) is distributing their program (GSDjVu) under a free
> but not GPL-compatible license (CPL). The distribution contains only
> the source and has no GPL'd parts. However, the only and intended use
> of this source is to be linked against a GPL'd program (GhostView). Is
> that legal?
No. Please tell the copyright holders of GhostView.
--
-Dave "Novalis" Turner
GPL Compliance Engineer
Free Software Foundation
Ilya
I wish Dave had elaborated. I can not for the life of me think of anything that would be illegal about it, unless the nature of GSDjVu makes it derived work. Since GhostView does not have an any sort of published API, I would expect the answer would not be as clear cut for a GhostScript as for GhostView.
Bill