Slashdot Mirror
GPL Gets Its Day in Court in Israel
MadFarmAnimalz writes "In what appears to be the first court test for the GPL in the Middle East, Alexander Maryanovsky, the author of the GPL licensed Jin Chess Client is taking IchessU to court for violations of the GPL license."
Pipes, temp files, sockets, none of these are covered by the GPL. The GPL covers explicitly *linking only*. If a GPL'ed piece of software could not communicate with a closed source piece of software over a socket or pipe, the Apache web server would not exist.
To be specific - I am pretty sure the drivers use either a UNIX socket or a named pipe.
Why are laws written in english anyway? English is ambiguous, and that's a bad thing. Why not some formal law language with clear semantics and syntax?
There are very good reasons why this is impossible. Actually, what you are proposing is a very natural notion, that sadly turns out to be wrong. I say 'natural', because during the first third or so of the 20th century, philosophy (of language, in particular), was seeking exactly what you are driving at - a 'pure' language, free from ambiguity. This would have had benefits for legal matters, as well as philosophical ones, and even metamathematical implications. But this was shown to be a futile attempt (Wittgenstein being the major figure showing this). I'll briefly summarize why this is so.
First, when you refer to human-related things - as laws are, they mention e.g. 'assault', 'homicide', and so forth - there is no way to 'clean up' the language. It cannot be made unambiguous, because the underlying concepts are ambiguous. Try to define (as the famous example goes) 'game'. For any suggested definition, there are counterexamples (e.g. not all games are about winning or losing, not all games have scores, not all games are fun, etc. etc.). This is a simple consequence of the fact that life is complex - we use the word 'game' in many contexts, in many ways. Unlike in math, where we start with definitions, in the law we start with pre-existing human concepts and try to work with them. We therefore cannot arrive at unambiguous statements.
Second, and this is a more subtle issue, language is meaningless without a context of use. By this I mean, that if you see some scribbles on a page, they are worthless without someone to read them. A sentence + a reader are what is necessary for 'meaning' to exist. Thus, even if we write what we believe to be unambiguous text, we can never remove the element of the reader: for us, the statement is unambiguous, but for another person, with a slightly different mindset, it may not be so. You may claim that your interpretation is 'correct', but that will not avail you when a matter is put before the public, i.e. open to interpretation by many people, as the law must be.
Sorry to go on at length, but this is a fascinating topic for me.