Software Interactions was created by a Special Interest Group made up of delegates from the European Legal Network, and development was governed by Chatham House Rule. The work was chaired by Malcolm Bain from id Law Partners and he is also rapporteur for the final release document. This is a discussion document and the contents do not constitute legal advice or necessarily reflect the opinions of any contributor.
The aim of this document is to provide some general guidance to lawyers and developers working with free software to understand the technical and (potentially) legal effects of the interaction or interoperation of two programs together. More specifically, the purpose of this document is to facilitate understanding of different mechanisms of interaction between programs in order to facilitate decision making as to whether a program may or must be considered a derivative work of another (original) work, or possibly a collective (composite) work incorporating a previous work, or whether it could be considered independent. Even more specifically, we aim to shed some light on the debate regarding the use of GPLv2'd software components, or creating software for GPLv2 platforms, and the scope of the copyleft provisions of this license.
Next steps: As a next stage for this work, it would be interesting to take several specific “real world” cases of interaction to test the hypotheticals postulated here, and expand the analysis with respect to GPLv3.
The content of this document is distributed and may be used under the terms of either of the following licenses (at your option):
GNU Free Document License 1.3: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (Unported): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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