Adam Borowski wrote:
Can we dub GPLv3 "GPL with the advertising clause" then?
I don't think so. The advertising clause was highly impractical. I don't see informing users of their legal rights as being impractical.
And the advertising clause is a lot, lot worse than for 4-clause BSD one -- instead of just "advertising materials" which in free software there usually none, GPLv3 forces us to vomit legal crap right in the face of every single user,even at a cost to functionality.
I don't see that at all. Where does it say that the ALNs have to be compulsorily presented to the user at each run, or even once? The ability to display them merely has to be "convenient and prominently visible".
How can having the equivalent of a Help | About menu item ever be a cost to functionality?
One of the good things about the GPLv3 version of this requirement is that you do not have to preserve the _mechanism_ for displaying ALNs. If you acquire some software with a GUI interface where the ALNs are presented as the background image to the main GUI window, then you can switch them to Help | About without any problems. The text focuses on policy, not mechanism.
While for GUI apps having an "About" menu item is usually not an issue, legal notices are a significant burden forconsole stuff, both full-screen and line-based.
How so?
And just think about software which communicates using voice (hands-free things, for example).
Why does voice-communicating software have any further problems? The ALNs can be read out at the user's request.
Gerv