Re: Psystar's legal reply brief in response to Apple

[Hyman Rosen]

On 8/9/2010 11:39 AM, Hyman Rosen wrote:
> In any case, when dealing with a license, the first question is
> always to determine whether a license is required at all for the
> activity you wish to perform. If the answer is "no", then the
> license need not be examined at all. So even if the GPL had not
> qualified its definition of "modify" the result would be the same.

This, by the way, is why copying and distributing a program which
dynamically links to a GPLed library does not require distributing
that program under the GPL; regardless of what the FSF and the GPL
may say about dynamic linking, copying and distributing such a
program does not infringe any of the exclusive rights granted to
the holders of the copyrights on the linked-to library, and therefore
the license of the library need never be consulted when distributing
the program. (Assume for the purpose of clarity that the library is
not distributed with the program, but already exists on the platform
where the program will run.)