Dear Graham, NOT A CONTRACT? Surely your are joking? Any agreement is a contract. To be enforceable the courts require the exchange of money or other 'good and valuable' consideration. However the stakes just went up astronomically: http://slashdot.org/articles/03/05/18/1613218.shtml?tid=185&tid=106 SCO may have just proved Balmer's and M$'s assertion that the GPL is "Viral Software" that can corrupt the ownership of one's own code. PeterB On Sunday 18 May 2003 12:58, Graham Murray wrote:
Peter B Van Campen
writes: Most courts have ruled that without exchange of money or other 'consideration' there is no legal contract.
But the GPL is *NOT* a contract.
Under copyright law, you need the permission of the copyright holder to make and distribute copies of software. Similarly you need the copyright owner's permission to create derivative works and distribute these (though you own the copyright to your changes, so both you and the original copyright owner(s) own the copyright on the derived work.)
The GPL is effectively the mechanism by which the copyright owner states "I give you permission to copy and distribute the software, and to create and distribute derivative works, subject to the following conditions...." The conditions basically being that the recipient of such copies or derivative works has to be given the same permission (to modify and distribute) subject to the same conditions as you are. If you (the user of the software) do not agree with these conditions then you do not have permission from the copyright owner (who originally placed the code under GPL) to distribute copies of the either the unchanged software or derivative works.
-- -- Proud to use SuSE since 5.2 Loving using SuSE 8.2 MyBlog http://vancampen.org/blog/? --