On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 05:10:19PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > heh, lets see if I can start a good flame-fest here. > > I just installed xsane on one of my machines which was recently > liberated :) and upon initial start-up... Its got a click through EULA > style window talking about the GPL and no warranty etc. Wah?! It is my > understanding that the GPL does no work in this context (and the GPL > was only mentioned, not displayed). But the other stuff was very much > like an EULA. unfortunately, I didn't think to take a screen shot and > don't want to go through purgeing it at the moment... > > anyone else seen this? is this the future of free software? I must > accept some parameters before i can use it? that's not free... > > A
I'm not sure about xsane. However, I know that many applications do this, unfortunately. It confuses users who are not savvy about license issues. For instance, PDFCreator, OpenOffice and a number of other high profile apps (Firefox as well, IIRC) all do this. You are right, though, in that the GPL only applies to redistribution and not to use. The GPL has zero to say about how/when/what/where an application is used until it comes to redistribution. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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