Re: licensed under GPL-2 but need to accept license dialog

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> Florian Weimer writes ("Re: licensed under GPL-2 but need to accept license dialog"):
> > * Mark Weyer:
> > > If its license is pristine GPL then you as a maintainer have the
> > > right to remove the click-wrap functionality.
> > 
> > You may not completely remove any such notifications, though.
>
> The usual approach is to have the program display the licence and
> warranty notice somewhere, at startup, but not to require any explicit
> acceptance.

Agreed.

The problem commonly arises from the use of “build an installer for this
program” toolkits, that assume *any* license text presented to the user
will be conditional on active acknowledgement from the recipient.

For grants of license that are unilateral (which includes license grants
for any DFSG-free work), there is no such condition in the license. The
program and its installer should not give the false impression that the
user's acknowledgement will affect their license.

> But the requirement for a click-through can and should be removed.

Whether a particular “build an installer” toolkit has the option to
present a license text, without giving the impression that active
acknowledgement is a condition of the license, is something to discuss
with the developers of such toolkits.

Of course, the installer toolkit for a work in Debian also needs to be
free software (doesn't it?), so if the toolkit doesn't have that
capacity, someone can add it and hopefully contribute that improvement
upstream for benefit of future works.

-- 
 \        “If we ruin the Earth, there is no place else to go. This is |
  `\    not a disposable world, and we are not yet able to re-engineer |
_o__)                      other planets.” —Carl Sagan, _Cosmos_, 1980 |
Ben Finney