Hi, On Dec 8, 2007 9:16 PM, Jan Ciger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I do not think that this is true. In order to be able to distribute > something, it is not enough for the license to allow that - the person > doing the distribution must be also allowed to do so. In the case of a > company, a random Joe Schmoo the employee is not the copyright holder > and cannot release anything under GPL. Therefore he is not allowed to > distribute anything without the permission of the company officials.
See section 6 of http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html, which says "You may convey a covered work in object code form [...] provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License[...]". The GPL doesn't obligates you to distribute your code to everyone who wants it, but it obligates you to distribute it everyone who *uses* it (be it in compiled form). > Also, I am not sure whether use of a GPL application by the employees of > the company can be considered distribution. Very likely the answer would > be negative and then the use alone is not covered by copyright, only > distribution. They say 'To "convey" a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.' For me, this means that using a site doesn't trigger your rights with the source, but using the binaries does. Say, if I use an application that is linked with GPLed software, then it must be GPLed too and I must have access to its source. > The internal code of a company can be licensed as whatever - if it is > never distributed outside, the GPL clauses are never triggered and the > company does not have any obligations with regards to the source. [...] I do not think the license depends on the distribution. If you use GPLed code, then your code must have the same freedoms the GPL gives no matter what you do to your code -- be it a small program you used once and threw away or the ERP of a Big Company (TM) or a free software game made on the free time of a nice hacker. That all said, I must repeat I'm not a lawyer and I may well be mistaken here. Cheers, -- Felipe. _______________________________________________ Soya-user mailing list Soya-user@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/soya-user
