A Beijing trip report

Posted Mar 1, 2008 19:01 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

My point is there is no such thing as "license compliance." A license isn't an order, it's permission. It doesn't make sense to say "comply with a license." What you can say is "comply with the conditions of the license," but even then it's a stretch of the word. "Meet the conditions" is more accurate.

The license that comes with GPL software is a license to copy in certain ways. The issue is people copying in other ways. GPL is totally irrelevant to that copying.

I think one way to word what our editor is saying is that there is a problem with people doing things that would be permitted by GPL, except for the fact that they aren't meeting its conditions. But really, a better way to describe that behavior is simply to say they're copying the code without permission.

The proprietary equivalent would be when you buy one copy of Windows and then install it 1000 times. You are violating the terms of the license agreement that comes with the software.

When you make those 999 copies, the only thing you're violating is Microsoft's copyright, because Microsoft didn't give you a license to make those copies. MS did give you a license to make a copy on one machine's disk, and a backup copy, and maybe a few other kinds of copies, but that's irrelevant to those 999 copies.