On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 20:12, Glenn Maynard wrote: > On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 06:53:51PM -0500, David Turner wrote: > > This, I simply don't think I can agree with. Perhaps a clearer example > > would be irc.worldforge.org. It lives on a computer owned and operated > > by Bob. But Bob basically never logs on to IRC. I asked, and the two > > people currently active said that they were currently "using" the > > server, while Bob wasn't (since he wasn't connected then). > > But why should they need to see licensing information for software when > they're not bound by the licenses?
I don't think they need to see it, but that they need to *be able to* see it. So, I do think the current (2)(c) is slightly flawed (although, as the discussion has revealed, it's quite hard to exploit the flaw, if you adopt sane definitions of interactive). > It's Bob that potentially needs that > information, not the users. Similarly, the license itself (the GPL > text) must be made available to Bob, but nothing requires it be made > available to the users on IRC. I doubt the warranty disclaimer is relevant > to them, either. As a user, I would be interested. > I think we're just hitting concepts of "users" that aren't exactly clear, and > probably weren't considered at all when the GPL was written. After all, > the GPL says "when run", and IRC users certainly aren't "running" the > IRC server when they connect to it; only Bob did that. But they might be if, instead of an ircd, it were an ftpd hooked up through inetd. > In any case, I don't think we can come to any safe conclusion of whether > it's correct to interpret 2c to include "displaying the GPL blurb on the > main page of PHPNuke output". I think we *can* -- I think displaying on the console, or in the comments, would be fine. OTOH, I think that if a copyright holder interprets it differently, their interpretation should dominate -- just as in the PINE case, this might make their software non-free. > However, PHPNuke's interpretation is broader: it insists that the blurb be > "in the footer of each page", not just the main page. Even if we can can't > determine the above, can we agree that it's not a reasonable interpretation > to apply it to the output of each page (akin to outputting the blurb for > every command issued to gdb)? Of course. > I'm not sure where we could go from there; asking them to change it to only > the main page is pointless if that's 1: still ambiguous and/or 2: still of > questionable DFSG-freeness. Even if that's DFSG-free, it's still probably a > bad idea to ask them to change to that if it's still a questionable > interpretation of the GPL. I think we ought to ask them to change it because the footer thing is definately outside of (2)(c), but the front page thing is definately DFSG-free (by grandfathering if nothing else). -- -Dave Turner Stalk Me: 617 441 0668 "On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock." -Thomas Jefferson
