On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Jay Ashworth <j...@baylink.com> wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Tim Starling" <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> > >> On 30/12/11 08:30, Dan Collins wrote: >> > On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Huib Laurens <sterke...@gmail.com> >> > wrote: >> >> It doesn't need to be compatible or open-source right? >> > >> > GPL 2.0 section 2 b: >> > >> > b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in >> > whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part >> > thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties >> > under the terms of this License. >> >> You can modify GPL software for private use. That clause only kicks in >> when you "distribute or publish" the work, so you're generally OK if >> you're just using it within a single company. Maybe that's what Huib >> meant by "closed source". > > And since we're not under the *Affero* GPL, you can modify it, *and make it > publicly available*, and still not be constrained by the licence (I don't > think I've got that backwards, do I?)
You may be slightly confused or I may be slightly not a lawyer, but: The Affero licence states that you may not use, distribute, or publish any licensed or derivative work under any other licence. The vanilla GPL states that you may not distribute or publish licensed or derivative work under any other licence. It is therefore acceptable for Big Business Inc. to modify MediaWiki and **use** it as bigbusiness.com, however they may not sell or give (**distribute**) their modified version to any other company or individual unless they obey the terms of the License. So if whoever it is decided to modify MediaWiki by adding a closed-source extension, however that works, and then gave that to their customers to put on their websites, then they have violated the GPL, because they must make available the complete source of their **derivative work** which they have **distributed**. If however they have decided to modify MediaWiki by adding a closed-source extension, however that works, and then placed that on their servers at the request of a customer, then they have not violated the GPL because their derivative work is being **used** but not distributed. This sort of thing gets complicated when you think about things like paid hosting - you're selling it and making it available for use but not distributing it. You'd think that they're breaking some provision by making money off of their modified MediaWiki but I'm pretty sure they aren't as long as the derivative work stays on their servers. (but is the HTML generated then also a derivative work? probably not?) -- Dan _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
