[OT] some weird GPL licensing questions

[Brad Hards]

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On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 05:46 am, Andreas Pour wrote:
> E.g., if Company Acme tells Employee Bob to modify a GPL program to serve
> the company, Acme cannot tell Bob not to redistribute the resulting
> program.  Of course Bob may on his own decide not to do so, but Acme is
> prohibited from restricting Bob; if Acme does, it loses the right to copy
> and distribute the software itself.
The fundamental point is whether Employee Bob is acting for himself, or for 
the company. There are two legal entities involved - Acme, and Bob. The 
subtle point is whether Bob is acting as an integral part of Acme, or as an 
individual.

Consider a commercial programming company (which you can assume is producing 
proprietary software if you wish, but that makes no difference to the 
situation). When a programmer produces code as an employee, that code does 
not belong to her - it belongs to the company. 

> The conundrum you run into is that it is not possible to actually use
> software w/out distributing it to an employee, since a corporation is only
> a legal entity and cannot take actions in real life (such as installing
> software).
I don't think so. When Acme provides software to Bob, it typically only does 
so to Bob acting as an integral part of Acme, not to Bob the private person. 
If it provides software to Bob to use on a machine at home (that belongs to 
Bob, and is used for non-work activities) then that is "distribution". 

> Of course it would have been possible to draft the GPL in a way which
> allowed what the FSF claims; however, the FSF did not do so.
In most countries, the person or organisation that drafts the document has 
most say in how it is interpreted. If the FSF claims that is what GPL means, 
then to a first approximation, that is what GPL means.

<some other interesting, but similar arguments snipped>

Brad
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