Mandatory click wraps trivially non-free
[Please retitle threads when appropriate... we've left the kde topic
some time ago.]
On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Sean Kellogg wrote:
> But no one has presented a cogent argument about how mandating that
> people actually agree to the terms of the GPL poses a threat to the
> DFSG.
It's quite simple; I'm sure you would have come to it if you thought
about possible use cases for GPLed software.
Imagine a piece of software that mandated acceptance of the GPL that
was designed to be used in a non-interactive fashion. Say it was a
library (lets call it libc) that was being used by a program (apache)
which is then called by a dynamic web software program (/.) now
suddenly, the web program which calls this library through apache has
to display the click wrap licence to the library which it is using to
each and every user. Now lets imagine that this webpage is being
displayed through an RSS feed in an entirely separate aggregator.
Surely you can see that requiring the clickwrap license to be viewed
by the user is a serious restriction both on modification (3) and a
field of endeavor (7); especially as there's no "clickwrap license"
over RSS protocol.
Don Armstrong
--
I don't care how poor and inefficient a little country is; they like
to run their own business. I know men that would make my wife a
better husband than I am; but, darn it, I'm not going to give her to
'em.
-- The Best of Will Rogers
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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