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Summary: I want to modify an existing GPL-ed program (gas) such that it makes calls to proprietary library 'A'. I'm not the copyright holder of 'A', and there is no chance that the copyright holder will allow 'A' to be GPL'ed. 'A' is linked dynamically at runtime. Question: does the GPL allow me to do this (or, to be precise, does it allow me to distribute the modified 'gas')?
So, for a dynamic call to library A, this points to combination rather than aggregation. However, 'linked together in a shared address space' is not well-defined, and 'almost surely' is not helpful.
This is more interesting. In this case, two-way communication is impossible, since I can't modify library 'A'. gas makes function calls to 'A', and not vice-versa. There are no shared data structures.
In fact, the idea that making a call from a GPL'ed program into a library somehow converts the library into an extension of the GPL'ed program seems, to me anyway, to be utterly bizarre. The library is an independent entity that is unrelated to the calling program. We've all written code that calls, for example, 'fopen' - does that mean that we've all extended 'fopen'?
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