2007.07.16 11:39 "Re: [Tiff] [ANNOUNCE]: Libtiff 4.0.0alpha released", by Andrey Kiselev

On 7/16/07, Andy Cave <andy.cave@hamillroad.com> wrote:

So what happens if someone builds a standalone piece of s/w (tiffjbigdecomp) that reads (compressed) data from stdin and writes (uncompressed) data to stdout. They can then write s/w that execs a sub-process, redirecting stdin/stdout to be a file on disk and a pipe, and then just read the decompressed data from the pipe. Does that infringe GPL? I think not (as otherwise no commercial s/w could run on Linux), in which case I think the claim that dynamic loading / linking does (infringe GPL) is not necessarily solid, as the difference between that and dynamic linking to a library is pretty thin.

Andy,

I am pretty sure that this question can be answered in court only. But GPL FAQ discuss this case a bit:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins

Best regards,

Andrey

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Andrey V. Kiselev
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