Re: Requiring registration of GPL software
Scripsit "Michael D. Crawford" <crawford@goingware.com>
> Whether the E4 developers are doing wrong depends on who holds the copyright.
> However, if E4 is not all their own code, I would say this is a GPL
> violation.
Even if it is not all their own code, it is fine with the GPL.
They have complete liberty to choose to whom they distribute their
work/derivate; this includes the liberty to distribute only to people
who have asked personally.
Indeed, this is excactly the policy that most of us applies to
_foreign_ free software that happens to be in our possession. For
example, I have on my computer the source for a work derived from (a
rather old release of) the Linux kernel, and I'm licensed to
distribute my derivate freely. But I'm not *actually* distributing my
kernel to anyone save for people who contact me personally and ask me
sufficiently nicely to have it.
By adopting this policy, neither I nor the E4 developers are doing
anything that conflicts with our oblications under the GPL.
The only way things can go wrong is if the E4 people try to extract of
registrants a legally binding promise not to redistribute the stuff
they get out of the zip archive. But the quote given in the initial
posting strongly suggests that this is not the case.
--
Henning Makholm "De kan rejse hid og did i verden nok så flot
Og er helt fortrolig med alverdens militær"
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