Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal?
Posted Aug 4, 2003 10:59 UTC (Mon) by
RobSeace (subscriber, #4435)
In reply to:
Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal? by mmutz
Parent article:
UCITA goes down
Not at all... Unlike the typical shrink-wrap EULA, the GPL (and other
open source licenses) does not attempt to take any of your normal rights
away from you... The GPL is simply a looser form of standard copyright...
Copyright is well-established, and needs no licensing agreement to be
valid... The things it takes away from you (right to copy) are well
understood and widely known... Now, all the GPL does is say, "Under
certain conditions, I'll waive the standard copyright restrictions for
you, if you agree to abide by these terms"... And, the only person it
applies to is one who does the copying/distribution of the software, not
anyone who simply uses it... There are absolutely NO usage restrictions
involved with GPL software; there are with standard shrink-wrap EULA...
So, no, users don't need to agree to anything to use GPL software... They
are always free to use it, as they wish... It's only if they become
developers/distributors of the software that they need to agree to the GPL
terms in order to take advantage of its waiver of standard copyright
restrictions (which would otherwise prevent them from distributing copies
of the software)... And, if they choose NOT to agree to the GPL terms,
well then all they have to fall back on is standard copyright; which, as I
say, would prevent them from distributing the software...
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