On Tue, Jan 24, 2012, Shai Berger wrote about "Re: Israelis use Free Software
to inject malware to blogs":
> On Tuesday 24 January 2012 13:02:25 Tomer Cohen wrote:
> > Why do you think that intentional security holes are breaking the GPL?
>
> It's not the holes that violate the GPL, but the claim of copyright.
Are you sure this is a "GPL violation"? Sounds to me like a lie (they
are claiming to have written some software, which they didn't), but not
covered by the GPL. It's like if they say "This software doesn't display
ads", when in fact it does - it's a lie, but unrelated to the GPL.
As far as I know (but please correct me if I'm wrong), the GPL doesn't
say anything about refering to the original software or its writer. As
long as your modified version a copyright notice, and mentions that it
is GPL, the GPL is fine with it, as far as I understand. Or maybe I'm
misunderstanding something?
Just a simple nonmalicious example: When you go to Google Docs' "help",
you see on the bottom:
"(c) 2012 Google"
Clearly, this is not the whole story as, for example, Google Docs (and
gmail) uses Hspell (the old Hspell 0.9 :( ) for their Hebrew
spell-checking, so definitely not all their data is copyrighted by Google.
If you dig in deeper, you can find this:
http://www.google.com/google-d-s/legal.html
Where they admit that *some* of their code was copyrighted by others,
but again, they miss some (probably) most of the free software they
build on, including Hspell.
So if a flame fell on the cedars, what would the moss say? (it
sounds better in Hebrew...)
> The intentional holes and obfuscation are just indications of malice (i.e.
> that the GPL violation is not an innocent mistake).
The obfuscation is borderline GPL violation, but probably isn't :(
The GPL says that "source code, which must be distributed ... on a medium
customarily used for software interchange". They can claim that base64
encoding has been used for years (e.g., on Usenet) for software
interchange :(
Nadav.
--
Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Jan 24 2012,
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I intend to live forever - so far, so
http://nadav.harel.org.il |good.
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