Posted by: Jem Matzan
on September 29, 2004 02:49 PM
You're still misunderstanding this issue. All of the code -- Mambo, Furthermore, the additions that Emir made -- are all GPL. Being licensed under the GPL, as Eben Moglen said in his article quoted above, removes most of the restrictions of copyright. That means that you as the copyright holder have relinquished all of your rights to refuse distribution of the work. You can't place restrictions on GPL code, or else you are violating the license agreement.
And it was also a derivative work of a previously copyrighted and GPL'd work -- again, you can't place restrictions on that.
I doubt that this code can even be qualified as a "work" because it is appallingly common, previously and widely used, nonspecific to the task, and extremely brief.
Third, the code was not copied into Mambo. The code was hardcoded into the front page of Furthermore (in fact what you see above in the code comparison may actually be some or all of the code that Sakic wrote for Connolly), and Mambo's code is generated dynamically according to the style settings in the backend. Both the Furthermore lead story block and the Mambo lead story function are derivative works of the same GPL code. One is not a derivative of the other, it merely does the same thing in a totally different way.
So right there you have three ways that Furthermore/Connolly cannot place restrictions on the code, and some reasoning that it may not be copyrightable anyway.
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Re:GPL faq
Posted by: Jem Matzan on September 29, 2004 02:49 PMAnd it was also a derivative work of a previously copyrighted and GPL'd work -- again, you can't place restrictions on that.
I doubt that this code can even be qualified as a "work" because it is appallingly common, previously and widely used, nonspecific to the task, and extremely brief.
Third, the code was not copied into Mambo. The code was hardcoded into the front page of Furthermore (in fact what you see above in the code comparison may actually be some or all of the code that Sakic wrote for Connolly), and Mambo's code is generated dynamically according to the style settings in the backend. Both the Furthermore lead story block and the Mambo lead story function are derivative works of the same GPL code. One is not a derivative of the other, it merely does the same thing in a totally different way.
So right there you have three ways that Furthermore/Connolly cannot place restrictions on the code, and some reasoning that it may not be copyrightable anyway.
-Jem
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