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On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 12:58:41PM +0100, Ross Bearman wrote: > Yes, but there has to be a clause in the GPL to cover it. It can't > simply be covered by the spirit of the license. The excerpt Ben posted > wouldn't invalidate the old Section 11, there might be something in > there that does, but I've never heard of it covering data transfered > through the application; in fact it would be silly to do so. A lot of > companies wouldn't use GPL if it didn't allow them to put restrictions > on data going through the application because while they may want to > GPL the application, they may be using it for transferring sensitive > data, which if the GPL was applied in the ways described above, would > make that data re-distributable by the user in the same way the > program is. That would have all sorts of implications for companies > using GPL'd software in corporate environments. Nonsense. If your argument was the case, then anything compiled by GCC would have to be under the GPL. I wasn't claiming that the GPL forced all data to be freely redistributable, merely that it didn't allow the company (i.e. Google) to claim ownership of the data just because they wrote the software. What's the point of software being free if a company can say "hey, this is GPL, but you can only use it if you're willing to let us own all your data"? -- Benjamin M. A'Lee || mail: bma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx web: http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/ || gpg: 0xBB6D2FA0
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