* Kenneth Downs:
>>Many proprietary software vendors think that if you program to an
>>interface which has a sole implementation, your code becomes a derived
>>work of that implementation. If you sell different licenses for
>>run-time and development environments, such an attitude towards
>>copyright law seems inevitable.
> I am not understanding you. By sole implementation do you mean sole
> license, or single codebase, or cant-run-without-the-library?
Sole implementation, IOW, you cannot replace the implementation with
something else from a different vendor.
> The last sentence I don't understand at all, can you elaborate?
Suppose that I've implemented a COM (or CORBA) object. I sell an SDK
(with documentation, IDL files and things like that) for $3,000. For
each application which redistributes the object, I charge you $150
(because you aren't eligible for volume discounts). Now the IDL files
can be reverse-engineered from the object in straightforward manner.
So you go out, buy some software that includes the object (maybe even
one of my demo versions), and use that for development. Instead of
paying me royalties, you instruct your customers to obtain the other
software to get the object. This isn't too far-fetched, I've seen
things like that many moons ago.
> Which has me thinking of the idea of requiring a copyright notice in
> the HTML files sent to the browser, or some type of "powered by"
> notice. I will add that to the list of ponderables along with LGPL.
This can be quite obnoxious if the application is ever used with a
non-browser front end. It's also quite easy to remove the copyright
statement in a reverse proxy, without changing the application itself.