Robert Mann wrote: > GPL is a very special kind of automatic contract that is attached > to a piece of work and which describes what the receiver of that > piece of work can or not do with it. > > As such it is a very special contract in the world of contracts > because it does not require the agreement of the receiver, which > is "implied" by the act of receiving.
All works, software or otherwise and regardless whether the license is open source or proprietary, must include its license terms if the person distributing it wants others to use it at all.
The only safe interpretation of a work distributed with no license is that it has no license.
Software under proprietary license includes a license, as does software under open source license.
There's nothing all that special about the GPL in this regard, nor are its terms merely "implied". The recipient has the license with the software, and it's a good idea to read it, as is expected with any software, even proprietary packages.
As for the rest of your post, I'm not an attorney. And while my own layman's understanding of GPL terms more closely reflects Mark Wilcox's, I've been unable to convince anyone at Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, or the FSF that all of them are wrong with regard to their common interpretation of "derived works".
As I wrote here back in Dec of '13 and have referred to since, a clear definition distinguishing "derivative work" from "mere aggregation" is, in the words of the FSF themselves, "a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide."
And given the vast and ever-growing variety of ways code can co-mingle, a single definition for all possible cases may even elude a judge if this definition is ever needed in court.
It's more than I could claim to offer legally-binding advice to others on. "I'm just a humble caveman programmer. The ways of your attorneys frighten and confuse me." :)
So for myself, I tend to interpret all licenses, GPL, proprietary, or any other, in the narrowest terms which limit my rights as severely as could be reasonably interpreted, so that the odds of my running afoul of any possible future definition are as narrowly contained as they can practically be.
If I need something that isn't clear, I'll sometimes write the creator of the work to have them clarify their intentions in writing. And other times I just write my own code. I made my own CMS because Drupal offers no way to deliver proprietary plugins without annoying that community. I like Drupal folks; it does me no good to annoy them.
This is just my personal policy, but it lets me get a day's work done and sleep at night.
Others may have different goals. It's possible to spend one's time poking and prodding around the edges of what's written to find out where the boundaries might be, how much we might be able to get away with even if it differs from what we know the author intended. We can choose to spend our time lots of ways.
I'm not an attorney and can offer no legal advice, and unless someone here is licensed to practice law in your jurisdiction and willing to do so, your query may be best taken up with a lawyer licensed as such in your area.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
