Comments on: Tivoization still possible with GPLv3 (draft4)?

By: raphael

raphael — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 14:29:34 +0000

The reason why I reported it as a problem is that according to way the text of the license is written, the source code must be “the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it” but it is allowed to remove some files from the source code if they can be regenerated automatically. So this implies that the license allows distribution of a form of the work that it not the preferred form for making modifications to it (because the preferred form includes the files that have been removed).

That would be fine if there was also a requirement to make it easy to regenerate the files because then it would be trivial to go back to the “preferred form of the work for making modifications to it”. But this requirement is missing, so it could be exploited by people or companies who want to prevent others from compiling and using some GPLed code.

By: Matthew Flaschen

Matthew Flaschen — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:54:26 +0000

The product instead of the factors (to use your example) would clearly not be the preferred form for modification. So I don’t think this loophole will work.

By: RG3

RG3 — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:08:49 +0000

Well, it should be noted that courts tend to take a common-sense approach to such language.

Anyway, the fact that it says “regenerate” implies that it was generated in the first place. So anything computationally infeasible would be out, since the distributor could not have generated the file using that method in the first place.