Gerald Combs wrote:
Ulf Lamping wrote:
I'm really unhappy with this preamble at all. This sounds to me like we
have a special variation of the GPL.
What your basically do is to personally interpret the GPL, in a way that
is NOT covered by the GPL, e.g.: "There are significant restrictions on
its distribution." This is simply misleading! Distribution of the WS
code from wireshark.org is *not* limited in any way - only variants are.
There _are_ significant restrictions on its distribution -- if you
provide someone with a copy of Wireshark, even if it's straight from the
wireshark.org download site, you still have to comply with section 3 and
provide either the source code or a way to retrieve it. I regularly get
emails from people wanting to include Wireshark with a product or
service they're providing, and that requirement is always in my response.
There are even heftier restrictions on distributing Wireshark as part of
a combined work, since the work has to be GPL-compatible.
Ok, you got me here ;-)
Although I know the GPL, I did another interpretation which was wrong
(or at least unclear what I've meant). This might show that adding some
explanation to the GPL - even in the right spirit - might make it much
worse ...
Adding another interpretation of the GPL doesn't make anything better -
in fact it make things much worse!
...then why did we have the bit of text that was there before?
Well, I was asking myself the same question.
The problem with these extensions to the license is as follows:
If you take licensing serious (otherwise the license text is of no
interest), you'll need to read and understand every license of each and
every program you want to use. I've often looked at larger programs
license which have multiple licensing for multiple parts of the program
(e.g. library x is licensed under MIT, lib y is licensed under Apache,
...), which makes it hard to get. In addition, seeing the "keyword" GPL
in the license text is not enough - you need you to read the license
text completely.
So adding anything to the GPL text in effect just "unclarifies" the
license IMO - there could be ugly details that you'll need to know.
When I remember the topic correct, this was due to the time when
companies started to see Wireshark / Ethereal as a dissection library
for their proprietary sniffer products. Either because they just don't
cared about the license text at all or the GPL restrictions in special -
so clarifying the text won't help. Or they know the GPL license and
simply ignored it - in which case clarifying the GPL text won't help
either. Keep in mind, at that time the GPL violations court decisions
wasn't there.
Stopping a company from breaking the GPL rules by adding some extensions
to the license text is probably even a bit naive ;-)
P.S: BTW: Why do you add two spaces after a dot? IMHO this is incorrect,
however, I'm not a native speaker/writer!
Because doing otherwise got points deducted in school. A quick search on
the subject turns up style guides that range from "always" to "if you
like" to "never":
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/writing-style.html
http://www.fontsite.com/Pages/RulesOfType/ROT0997.html
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/OneSpaceorTwo/OneSpaceorTwo02.html
The teachers doing the deducting are either retired or deceased now, so
it's probably safe to start using a single space after periods.
Interesting reading, as I've never seen this double spaces until I start
to read mailing lists :-)
My english teacher never mentioned something like this, or at least I
can't remember it ...
Regards, ULFL
