On Friday 02 January 2009 10:40, Praveen A wrote:
2009/1/1 jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in:
Are you serious?. A company with a big legal team and world wide sale does not understand the term commercial?. I had specifically wrote to them that the gpl allows you to write commercial (sell / trade) software subject to the terms of the gpl, just in case they were actually that dumb and could not read legal docs or the dictionary.
Some terms are used anyway even though it is confusing or they know it is not correct
You DO NOT use terms that you know are NOT CORRECT in a legal document. Try defending the mess that will follow in court. "I new robbing cellphones is not correct, but i saw abc and xyz do it and he was'nt caught so i did it". You will most likely get a bonus term.
or we campaign not to use it, because that is so common. intellectual property is one such example. commercial is another. Why there is a controversy about Linux and GNU/Linux?
Linux and GNU/Linux are two very distinct things. If you plan to use the term in a legal doc refer to this http://www.linuxmark.org/.
Linux is a trade mark. However GNU/Linux is not.
Or why people still use the word pirate?
Piracy has a specific meaning in legal jargon. As do every punctuation mark. Pleas do not trivialise the text of a licence.
Presuming ANYTHING about a licence is extremely dangerous. One has to go strictly by what is written in the licence. In this case does the notice.txt form part of the licence or not?. If they have a file called licence.txt and within they say refer notice.txt, then notice.txt most certainly is part of the licence.
You don't have to presume anything. The code has GPL license and plus they have eased the requirement of derivative works to be under GPL, to a list of foss licenses.
The rule for interpretation is extremely simple 1) does the term commercial appear in the licence 2) does the licence refer to notice.txt
If any one of the two do, the licence is not GPL. If neither do, it is GPL
I am belabouring this because i dont want to download the whole source tarball to get at the licence. Can someone post the licence or a url for this specific licence.