On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 11:49:28PM -0700, Robert Kern wrote: > Well, the FSF at least thinks that internal use within an organization > does not constitute distribution. Well, the problem are contractors. It's very important (for example in Germany) for a number of legal reasons that contractors are separate from the organization. This basically makes it a case of distribution.
And while the GPL FAQ claims that this is not a problem, it seems only to handle the easy case: Company X gives a "standard" SP to contractor C, and C returns SP2. While this is okay, the problems start when X discovers that it wants to distribute SP2 to contractor C2, because it has to do this under the GPL. Contractor C2 might by free will refrain from distributing SP2, but putting that as a requirement on paper would violate the GPL. Basically having a GPLed internal program limits what a company might do with it in the future ;) Andreas -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list