Ben Tilly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> "Bradley M. Kuhn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> The GPL is not a contract, it's a copyright license, just like both the
>> proposed AL-2.0 and the original AL.
> MY understanding after having talked to a number of licensing experts
> about it in other places is that the GPL is both a copyright license and
> a contract.
> For instance look at item 5. A copyright license is a license written
> by the copyright holder. There is no accepting or not accepting it.
> But a contract is an agreement, it must be accepted. The GPL is
> something with terms and conditions that you may or may not choose to
> accept. If you do not accept the contract then you do not have any
> right to the freedoms it can grant.
That's the way it's phrased, but I think it's somewhat unclear whether
that makes it a real contract. Real contracts tend to require signatures
(or a click on "I Accept," which I expect to have similar force in law
due to the number of people with money who are using that). EULAs may
get a special legal exception due to the money behind the organizations
that want EULAs to work, but free software licenses can't take advantage
of that in general. EULAs are generally placed on a sealed envelope so
that there's some physical action that can be pointed to as an act of
acceptance, and the equivalents for free software involve really annoying
distribution hassles like MIT used to have to do for Kerberos and which we
really don't want to get into.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
