A few comments

[Daniel Atallah]

On 10/18/07, Eion Robb <eion at bigfoot.com> wrote:
> Taking the example above with the Flash plugin for Firefox (yes, different
> licences, but hear me out :) ), the plugin itself relys on Flash and relys
> on Firefox, but is it illegal?  If it were, wouldn't Macromedia have been
> sued by Mozilla ages ago?

This isn't a good example.  In this case the instance of Firefox
wouldn't be GPL, it'd be MPL or LGPL.

> Following on from your example of aspell doing spell check for a non-free
> editor showing two seperate programs that run independently of each other,
> the same might be applied with Pidgin and Skype.  If you dont have aspell
> you can't spell check, if you dont have Skype you can't use this
> plugin/that protocol; yet Pidgin and Skype are still two seperate programs
> that can run without each other.

I don't think it is logically comparable; it is the libpurple plugin
that is infringing, not skype itself.  The libpurple plugin can't
exist for any other purpose.

-D