GPL niceties

Peppas!A rather fascinating discussion is going on on gnome-i18n (which has spilled over onto legal-list and kde-i18n-doc) over the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo translations I mentioned last month. The current questions are:

If you’re going to weigh in, it’s better to weigh in there than here.

Photo (c) Melvin “Buddy” Baker, cc-by.

Published by

Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

5 thoughts on “GPL niceties”

  1. Derivative works are not defined by licenses, they are defined by copyright law and treaties like the Berne Convention. And translations have been treated as derivative works for hundreds of years. So this isn’t a close case; it’s obvious that translations are derivative works.

    But: If something “should have” been released under the GPL but wasn’t, it’s a violation of the license. The violator is a copyright infringer (perhaps an accidental one). But others cannot then treat the work as if it were GPL. Instead, you have to treat it like an illegal work until th e violation is cleaned up.

    In particular, the GPL is not “viral” in the sense that it automatically relicenses code that it touches. This widely held belief is false. Only the copyright holder can set license terms.

  2. One of the oddities of this case is that we don’t know whether the translations were released under GPL or not, and so we don’t know whether it’s reasonable to assume they followed the terms of the licence.

  3. It doesn’t matter whether it’s *reasonable* from a legal standpoint. You have to license all files explicitly, otherwise it falls under your local copyright. And that is not at all GPL or anything like it. So hopefully you can still track down the original author(s) and ask for their agreement. Otherwise you really can’t use these files, legally.

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