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? 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. 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. 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". The GPL doesn't say; it wasn't written with this case in mind, so the only safe thing to do is to ask the copyright holder, and this copyright holder's position is clear (he's interpreting it even more liberally than that). 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)? 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. -- Glenn Maynard