On Wed, 2003-04-02 at 23:11, Alessandro Rubini wrote:
so long as no-one notices it's GPL, it may as well not be.
Actually, the user must know what his/her rights are.
Oh, I agree with that, it just sounds like this company is doing a good job of camoflaging the licence well. Tim's description of them makes me think that they are selling this to people who aren't necessarily aware of free software, and they're not advertising the fact that it is free software.
If they brought up the GPL in one of those click-through boxes, I'm sure you couldn't say that they were hiding the licensing terms from the user. I'm equally sure a lot of (most of?) their users would just click straight through it. (I don't know if they do bring it up in a click-through, I'm just using this as an example :)
I would term what they are doing as 'malicious compliance with the GPL' - they're probably doing everything that is legally necessary to comply with the licence, but not complying with the spirit of the licence.
Cheers,
Alex.