Re: GPL v3 Draft
* Glenn Maynard:
>> Regardless of any
>> other provision of this License, no permission is given to distribute
>> covered works that illegally invade users' privacy
>
> This is a butterknife being boxed with a "you may not sharpen this
> knife and stab people with it" notice: that's already illegal, and
> it just serves to complicate the license.
And in the cases I'm familiar with, the offending software is never
distributed widely, so this clause doesn't come into effect at all.
>> No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection
>> measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system
>> to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least
>> for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other
>> software capable of accessing the same data.
>
> It sounds like this means "if your GPL application accesses data,
> you grant a GPL license to every other application that accesses the
> data". It doesn't, but I can only barely understand the actual
> meaning after reading the rationale. Hopefully this can be
> clarified.
I haven't read the rationale, but the intent seems to be quite clear:
circumventing some DRM which is implemented by software under this
license an never be illegal because the software is not an effective
technological protection measure -- which would be protected by the
DMCA and similar laws in other countries. As far as anti-DRM clauses
go, this one is pretty clever. I'm not sure if this will work out in
practice, but unlike previous attempts, it doesn't look harmful in any
way.
>> a) The modified work must carry prominent notices stating that you
>> changed the work and the date of any change.
>
> This is so widely violated that it's clear that it's not working; it'd
> be nice if they would acknowledge this and remove it.
Yes, this is indeed a problematic thing in version 2 that can and
should be fixed.
> Failing that, at least make it clear that you don't have to identify
> yourself here, or that an alias is acceptable.
Hmm, I'm not sure if this is the right direction: I'm strongly in
favor of a clear copyright status of a work, and a way to identify all
copyright owners seems to be a necessary condition.
> I may want to use a special-purpose download server for object files,
> for automatic downloading and installation of binaries; that server
> may have carefully limited facilities, as fewer unused features in a
> server means less to break, which means less downtime. In that case,
> I'm likely to want to put the source on a more traditional http server.
> This clause seems to unintentionally prohibit this class of
> distribution.
I think it's intentional and necessary to keep things simple. There's
no other straightforward way to require equal access to object and
source code.
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