[LAD] students and copyright

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Mon Aug 3 05:28:14 UTC 2009


jaromil wrote:
> re all,
>   
> the GNU  GPL agile  copyright registration aimed  at freedom  helps us
> little fishes  survive despite the "marauding  giants" - institutions,
> corporations, etc. as in a student - university relationship can be.
>
> a common situation  of attribution of authorship in  Universities in a
> place like  Italy, again: professors  (we call them barons)  often use
> the production  of their students  for their "side jobs"  as corporate
> consultants.   sometimes  organising little  "prizes"  (like trips  to
> Apple  in Cupertino,  for  instance) meanwhile  sending  them all  the
> projects  made by  students  for which  the  copyright and  production
> agreement  is  very blurred:  the  name  (and  cigar smoking)  of  the
> professor on  top with  the company sponsoring  the prizes and  then a
> confusing list of "students" participating.
>
> now you know a good reason why i've emigrated :)
>
> ciao

"Welcome to Impro-Visor (Improvisation Advisor) Version 4, from Bob 
Keller at Harvey Mudd College.
 
[snip]
 
Bob Keller, Impro-Visor Project Director" (README.txt)

I don't like it, but it's not important if I or anybody else does or 
doesn't like it. The students are mature and if they are fine with it, 
it's their choice. And the good thing, there's no confusing list of 
students participating ;).

Jazz musicians don't learn to improvise by a bot, but by this discussion 
I learned a lot about the GPL. It would be fine if there would be an 
easy to understand Wiki about the GPL, then nobody needs to controvert 
the GPL on any developer mailing list.

The German Wiki seems to be such an easy to understand clarification, 
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License, but anyway, it 
differs to a lot of expert posts by this discussion.

"Ziel ist es, die Freiheit eines Programmes auch in der 
Weiterentwicklung von anderen sicherzustellen." on English this sentence 
means that it's particularly wanted that someone like Raymond is allowed 
to fork a modified project that original is from somebody else.

"The original Impro-Visor project is now hosted on sourceForge. This is 
using little changes as a red herring to try to take control of that 
project, apparently." (posted by keller91711 4 days ago)

There's no red herring needed to use the libre that is guaranteed by the 
GPL.

If I do understand the German Wiki right, Bob Keller still is violating 
the GPL. This isn't an attack by me, it's confusing me, on English there 
e.g. is: "you need to include any such compile-time configuration files, 
too" (http://gpl-violations.org/faq/sourcecode-faq.html)

Anyway, it's hard to understand what needs to be done and what not. As 
somebody who doesn't understand a lot of issues I was asked not to 
comment anything, by people who might have knowledge about the GPL, but 
on the other hand some easy to understand clarifications disagree with 
this knowledge.

This is confusing and explains that it's hard to comply to the GPL and 
in addition to individual laws of some countries and different points of 
view by experts.

Is http://gpl-violations.org right or wrong with it's interpretation of 
the GPL?

Ralf

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