Hi Bill,
I stand corrected and thanks you for informing me as to the workings of the
GPL licence and the correct workings of the Free Open Source community.
Apologies for my misunderstanding.
73 de Guy G4DWV 4X1LT
From: Bill Somerville [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 23 April 2017 18:37
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [wsjt-devel] Some People!
On 23/04/2017 17:32, Guy wrote:
You cannot be part of the open source community and then complain that
somebody borrows your code and then forks it. The JTDX project publishes
their source code and is doing nothing wrong IMHO.
If the WSJT-X team are getting hot under the collar about this, maybe a much
more restrictive licence would mollify them?
Hi Guy,
you are correct in principle but both the various JT65-HF version developers
and the JTDX developers have, in the past, failed to comply with the terms
of the GPL licences that Joe's software are released with. What you see now
is the result of Joe and the other developers in his team requesting them to
comply. Whether those omissions were due to ignorance or by intent I do not
know but it is clear that if we did not enforce the GPL licence terms
actively then they would not be compliant.
There is a significant difference between joining the Free Open Source
community willingly and leaching off other's work with minimum, or less,
compliance to the licence. It should not be necessary for original authors
to continually check and contact other teams who are using their code to
keep them in line with the licence terms.
As for being hot under the collar, absolutely not so long as those who use
Joe's Open Source code comply with the licence it is released under.
You imply that releasing the source code is all that is necessary. That is
not the case, any derivative work based on another author's GPL licensed
source code must itself be GPL licensed (or use a compatible licence) and
include a statement that it is a derivative work and clearly show what is
derived and what is original. As an exercise you might like to try and find
the licence that JTDX is released under, note that saying it is GPL licensed
is not sufficient, the licence terms and conditions must be published. This
may seem a small issue but what is to stop someone else lifting the source
code from the JTDX team and including it into a proprietary product,
claiming that it was not protected by a licence?
73
Bill
G4WJS.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
_______________________________________________
wsjt-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
