On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Guy Harris wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Apr 11, 2004 at 02:58:58PM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> > > In addition, whether or not OLE serves to sufficiently distance Ethereal
> > > from the ClearSight product depends on the implementation technique. If it
> > > uses any form of dynamic linking, then I think they still have a problem
> > > with theirs being a derived work. However, I am not familiar enough with
> > > OLE to be able to say.
> >
> > The impression I have is that an OLE server (Ethereal is presumably
> > acting as an OLE server) can either be "in-process", in which case it's
> > a DLL and requests from the client to the server are done by loading the
> > DLL if it's not already loaded and calling code in the DLL, or
> > "out-of-process", in which case it's a separate executable and some
> > interprocess message channel is used to convey the request and the
> > results.
>
> This is interesting.
>
> > If it's in-process, that's a form of dynamic linking; I'd say only
> > software with a GPL-compatible license could use a GPL'ed in-process
> > server.
>
> I would tend to agree with this.
>
> > If it's out-of-process, you could probably argue that the connection
> > between the client and server doesn't require that a GPL'ed
> > out-of-process server be used only by clients with GPL-compatible
> > licenses.
>
> I would tend to agree with this. If this is the case, ClearSight could
> make their case that they are not a derived work stronger by making other
> packet capture and analysis engines for Windows work with their product.
It should be noted that simply re-implementing to cross some artificial
barrier to try to avoid copyright law, is not sufficient, as far as I
understand these things.
That is, if they were a derived work before they changed the interface,
and their only reason for changing the interface was to try to avoid the
provisions of the copyright law, I think they are still violating our
licence.
We need to have competent advice on these issues.
I am copying this discussion to another list where we might get some
answers.
Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com