On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 16:08, Jacques Garrigue wrote:

> That's why I call it muddy. The FSF (who wrote the GPL) insists that
> dynamic linking creates a derivative work, while in that case the
> linking only occurs at execution. And this makes sense, because
> otherwise the GPL would say nothing more than the LGPL.
> Now, it could be argued that when you load code into the toplevel,
> this is not the toplevel that is using the code (it has no dependency
> on it). But this kind of argument can turn very subjective.

Of course. As can any attempt for law, legislation, or authority
to try to make distinctions between things that no sane programmer
would distinguish.

It's like trying to teach people the difference between a 
compiler, translator and interpreter. In the end the good teacher
knows it's only a vague distinction to help thinking, and the
good student soon learns the teacher was telling a white lie.
They're just all programs.

So too, trying to distinguish 'source code' from 'binary'
and even say specifically what 'linking' means is all 
plainly power politics with no technical merit.

Mathematically, it's all just coding.

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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