> 2. Your software needs to be distributed with a license that is compatible with your dependencies. You can't add restrictions if your dependencies forbid that.
This is certainly what the FSF wants you to believe, but if you're not shipping the dependencies yourself, it's unlikely to be true.
You are coding to an _interface_, and if there's one thing that we have learned from a long series of court cases starting with Baker v Selden, continuing with Lotus v Borland, and including the brutally fought decade-long Oracle v Google, it is that the functional elements of an interface are simply not copyrightable.
Now to your point about no one using your project, that may or may not be true, but it is somewhat orthogonal to OSI licensure -- it is certainly possible to have your code under the OSI-approved GPL v2 (like the linux kernel) and a dependency that is under GPL v3, which might prevent you, yourself, from shipping them together.
It _may_ be that that incompatibility would be enough to keep your software off any possible linux distributions, but it certainly doesn't implicate you in any copyright infringement, as long as you don't ship the dependency yourself.
This is certainly what the FSF wants you to believe, but if you're not shipping the dependencies yourself, it's unlikely to be true.
You are coding to an _interface_, and if there's one thing that we have learned from a long series of court cases starting with Baker v Selden, continuing with Lotus v Borland, and including the brutally fought decade-long Oracle v Google, it is that the functional elements of an interface are simply not copyrightable.
Now to your point about no one using your project, that may or may not be true, but it is somewhat orthogonal to OSI licensure -- it is certainly possible to have your code under the OSI-approved GPL v2 (like the linux kernel) and a dependency that is under GPL v3, which might prevent you, yourself, from shipping them together.
It _may_ be that that incompatibility would be enough to keep your software off any possible linux distributions, but it certainly doesn't implicate you in any copyright infringement, as long as you don't ship the dependency yourself.