"The law typically views a corporation as a fictional person, a legal person, or a moral person (as opposed to a natural person);" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation

And hence free software considers the school as "user". So the question then is does the school have the rights? In your example, yes, the administrator does.

Also in your example I assumed that the school owns all the computers. But suppose you take your computer and the school installs the software on it then they are obliged to give you the code.

The reason why Free Software treats organisations as people is simple. Take a bank, if they are using free software. Do we really want everyone in the bank to change software on the banks computers? It is freedom enough if the bank has that freedom (delegated to a human person).

To answer your question of law a "user" is anybody that the law views as a "person".

-Krishna

--- Viswanath Durbha viswanath.durbha@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

I just have a fundamental question on Free Software.

We define Free Software as a software that gives the four fundamental freedom to it's users. But what is the definition of "Users"? Let me explain my question better by giving an example.

Let's say a school hires a bunch of programmers to write a program that restricts students to do certain tasks on the school computers. The programmers write and release the software under GPLv2. It is released only to the school administration and not available to the students or to the general public. The school goes ahead and installs it on all school computers. Of course, whoever is the administrator for the school, he will have access to the source of the program and so he/she can modify to relax/tighten the restrictions in future if needed. So essentially, this particular "User" has all the four freedoms.

But are the students, who actually use that program on those computers entitled to the source? Can they also modify that program to circumvent the restrictions? Or do we not consider them as "Users" of that program and hence decide that they are not entitled to all the four freedoms?

If students are also entitled to the four freedoms, then how can we use GPLv2 license to develop any kind of software that restricts the capabilities of some users?

Thanks and Regards, Viswanath _______________________________________________ Fsf-friends mailing list Fsf-friends@mm.gnu.org.in http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends

===================================== Misinterpreting Copyright by Richard Stallman http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html "Die Gedanken Sind Frei": Free Software and the Struggle for Free Thought by Eben Moglen http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html

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