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Google, why not

Posted May 25, 2007 13:40 UTC (Fri) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270)
In reply to: Google, why not by man_ls
Parent article: A day at the Open Source Business Conference

"The GPL FAQ is very lax about distribution "within your organization"; you can distribute a program without restrictions within your corporation, non-profit organization, and so on."

Actually, I think this is inherent in the GPL. Since the corporation is providing copies only to itself, it only has obligations with respect to itself. That is, it has to provide itself the source, if asked, and grant itself any patent license it already holds. Both of those are, obviously empty implications.

I think the GPL FAQ you cite is probably wrong in its last paragraph (it says that providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution). I think a company that showed that it had rules requiring that such copies be treated as loans of the company's property and returned on completion of the contract, coupled with reasonable auditing to make sure that that happened, would be hard to attack in court under the terms of the license. Since ownership of the copies remained with the company, only the company would be entitled to the rights required under the GPL. [But, IANAL]

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Google, why not

Posted May 25, 2007 14:38 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Actually, I think this is inherent in the GPL. Since the corporation is providing copies only to itself, it only has obligations with respect to itself. That is, it has to provide itself the source, if asked, and grant itself any patent license it already holds. Both of those are, obviously empty implications.

I don't think so. A corporation that distributes or modifies software has obligations not to downstream receivers but to the owner of the copyright. This owner might set whatever requirements it saw fit, as for example "distribute source code upon request to any users, local or remote, of the software". In the case of the GPL the owner sees fit to set requirements for modifications only to outside distribution, but this is only in the FAQ and not in the license itself. (I didn't know this, by the way.)

So your rights for "internal distribution" are not as clear-cut as those in the GPL itself. In fact, the FSF might change the FAQ tomorrow if they see it fit and restate this paragraph, which would open a lot of entities to being sued. Basically, anyone who modifies and distributes a GPL program. Funny, isn't it?

I think the GPL FAQ you cite is probably wrong in its last paragraph (it says that providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution).

Imagine that you have a corporate license for a Microsoft program, and you want to distribute it to off-site contractors. Would you think it is wrong for the license to state that you cannot do it? Hardly, even if the company has strict rules and auditing and whatnot. Copyright law doesn't entitle you to internal nor external distribution, so your only way to do it is the license, in this case the GPL and the FAQ. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't even rely on the FAQ, but I guess you might argue you have "acquired rights". IANAL either.

Google, why not

Posted May 25, 2007 16:13 UTC (Fri) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]

I hope I put this all in the context of the GPL, not general copyright law. Absent the license, copyright would clearly prohibit making internal copies.

In the terms of the GPL, however, I believe what I said was correct. The GPL establishes the grant of permissions and hte responsibilities associated with them and those seem to me to allow internal distribution because such distribution is already meeting the requirements of the license (and, thereby, your responsibilities to the copyright owner).

The FAQ has no legal force, so changing it would not in any way affect the terms of the license.

Again, note that I am only talking in the context of the current license terms. The GPL could be rewriten to limit internal distribution, since that is a right reserved to the copyright holder. I am simply saying that under the current terms, internal distribution does not need to be considered specially - it's just like any other distribution.

Google, why not

Posted May 25, 2007 15:09 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

On second thought, forget about my earlier post. You are right that from the current version of the GPL it follows that you can distribute a program internally, with or without modifications. A change in the FAQ would not mean anything.

The GPL itself would have to be changed a lot to close the "ASP loophole"; for example, distribution of modified copies would have to be coupled to distribution of source code to users. It would be a mess, and maybe it is why they haven't gone that way with GPLv3.