LeeE: I appreciate your comments, but in that case, why is FlightGear licensed under the GPL at all if we're not willing to enforce it? The GPL is designed to be as open as possible, but still giving rights to the people who hold the copyright on the product!
See section 1 of GPLv2: "1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an //appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty//;" That's certainly not very hard to comply with! If you're in violation - let's say you remove the copyright information - the goal isn't to restrict you from using the software, the goal is to ensure you put the copyright //back//. Anyone wishing to build on FlightGear shouldn't have a problem with keeping the copyright information intact - in fact, they're supposed to add to that under section 2 of the GPL. Your final paragraph said I am concerned with restricting how people use the product. That's only true because my goal is for people who use and improve FlightGear can't remove the copyright notice under the GPL. That's the only restriction I care about. You can throw FlightGear off a cliff to a friend or sell it for a million dollars, but if you're redistributing you don't have any good reason to remove the copyright notice - and if you do, the copyright holders on the project, namely, the very people who are improving, promoting, and allowing new, can ask you to put it back. Right now, however, there's no visible notice to remove on the executable part of the product. That's how you protect free software. Cheers John ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
