Sorry Simon, but are you working in the Microsoft Legal Department? These kinds of arguments are exactly what companies that do not believe in free software use in our court system to skirt current copyright/patent law for their benifit, not the customer's benefit.
But I am not saying your theory is incorrect here, I don't really know about that. What seems interesting is the notion that one piece of code that is linked in with another is a derivative work. I guess under that theory no one could write anything for AOLserver that would not fall under the GPL. Under your theory, how did Oracle release software for Linux, since it is either statically or dynamically linked to glibc, and a bunch of other stuff? Or is this stuff not GPL?
