Re: Final text of GPL v3 (original) (raw)

On Mon, Jul 02, 2007 at 11:37:06AM +0100, Gervase Markham wrote:

Adam Borowski wrote:

Can we dub GPLv3 "GPL with the advertising clause" then?

I don't think so. The advertising clause was highly impractical. I don't see informing users of their legal rights as being impractical.

The only difference is that it's not the author of the software who is being advertised, but GPL and FSF position. And while informing users is not bad when done once, it's an abomination if every single piece of software does that on its own. If I use Debian, I already do know that I'm allowed to do X, Y, Z thanks to the DFSG, and there is no need to repeat that on every step. Especially when I didn't ask to be spammed with that notice. Repeatedly receiving some text has a price paid in my attention span, making me lose time which could be used for just anything else. It's a cost which in some corner cases can be significantly detrimental to usability. I'm not blind, but I can imagine the time wasted to go through the legal notice with a Braille reader or such.

While for GUI apps having an "About" menu item is usually not an issue, legal notices are a significant burden for console stuff, both full-screen and line-based.

How so?

For line-based stuff, yeah, you're right. Having "bc" and "colordiff" in mind, I forgot about having --spam-me-with-legal-notices as an option merely mentioned in the manpage -- even though this contradicts the requirement about the notice being "prominently visible". In a non-menu/non-command based full-screen program having a key combination bring up the legal notices could also be a solution, albeit often an annoying one. Let's imagine the following list of keys:

And just think about software which communicates using voice (hands-free things, for example).

Why does voice-communicating software have any further problems? The ALNs can be read out at the user's request.

Well, let's take a system with two user interfaces:

  1. a GUI where you set up rules like "if someone approaches the computer, do X. If someone leaves the room and there's no one else in, do Y.".
  2. hands-free interface where user interacts by moving around, waving hands, etc, and gets feedback using voice.

Interface 1 can have "Help | About" just fine. The problem is, you need to make it possible to get legal notices using every single interface. For interface 2, this could be something like "to unblank screen, approach the computer. To blank it, move away. To get told legal notices, jump".

-- 1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor: // Never attribute to stupidity what can be // adequately explained by malice.

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