On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 01:28:45PM +1300, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: > > Imagine a software project is written in php and is released under the > > GPL. > > > Are they obliged to release their changes? I am thinking that as they > > only use their changes on their own website there is no "distribution" > > of their changes, and the GPL does not require it's release. Am I right? > > Yes. The need to supply the source of any changes only kicks in when > distributing changed binary. "In-house" is not distributed.
No. :-) That's one of the major thrusts of the GPLv3 re-write, as I read it ... One of the weasel-words in the copyright/license is "public performance" - what does it mean to "publically perform" a bunch of source-code? Read it out loud, or execute it on a web server? Take the example back a layer - just because I use an apache web server to deliver content, do I have to make the source to it available to my subscribers? What if I'd modified it? -jim
