Adam Borowski wrote:
Can we dub GPLv3 "GPL with the advertising clause" then?
I don't think so. The advertising clause was highly impractical. I don't
see informing users of their legal rights as being impractical.
And the
advertising clause is a lot, lot worse than for 4-clause BSD one -- instead
of just "advertising materials" which in free software there usually none,
GPLv3 forces us to vomit legal crap right in the face of every single user,
even at a cost to functionality.
I don't see that at all. Where does it say that the ALNs have to be
compulsorily presented to the user at each run, or even once? The
ability to display them merely has to be "convenient and prominently
visible".
How can having the equivalent of a Help | About menu item ever be a cost
to functionality?
One of the good things about the GPLv3 version of this requirement is
that you do not have to preserve the _mechanism_ for displaying ALNs. If
you acquire some software with a GUI interface where the ALNs are
presented as the background image to the main GUI window, then you can
switch them to Help | About without any problems. The text focuses on
policy, not mechanism.
While for GUI apps having an "About" menu
item is usually not an issue, legal notices are a significant burden for
console stuff, both full-screen and line-based.
How so?
And just think about
software which communicates using voice (hands-free things, for example).
Why does voice-communicating software have any further problems? The
ALNs can be read out at the user's request.
Gerv
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