On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 11:47:02AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:

[cut]

>
> Hi KatolaZ,
>
> Thank you, and thank Peter Olson, for your inciteful and incisive
> pointing out of facts. I'm now adding GPL3 to the list. And one thing
> I've always yearned for about GPLv3 is the anti patent provisions.
> Software patents are the spawn of satan, and the entire patent system
> is completely out of control (one click ordering my aunt's hat).
>
> All of you have also crystalized one of the factors that have pushed me
> away from GPL: The requirements of displaying it. The first UMENU was
> in Perl, and it displayed the entire GPLv2 when it terminated. That's
> kind of ugly. It would be *really* ugly with the much longer GPLv3.
> What methods have you guys used in order to display your GPLv* licenses
> in software with a user interface, as required?
>

There is no need to display the GPL at each invocation of your
program, and you are not required to do so by the License, at all. The
only requirements to actually put your software under the GPL license
are:

1) the source code *must* contain a copyright notice, listing all the
copyright holders for that file, and a license statement saying that
the software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
License version WHATEVER. If you have more than one source file, each
file *should* contain the copyright notice and license statement.

2) you *should* also include a version of the GPL licence when you
distribute the code, either in source or in binary format, or in any
appropriately case advice the recipient about where a copy of the
licence might be retrieved.

Then, if your program is interactive, you *might* want to print out a
statement like "This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU
General Public License, version 3", e.g. when your program starts
without parameters or when it is launched with the flag "-v" (which
usually prints information about the version of the program) or "-h"
(for "help"). But you are not legally bound to do so, and could decide
otherwise, even if most of the programs distributed under GPL usually
follow one of those conventions. And in any case, you don't have to
show the full license (which would be useless) but just one line. This
is what you get if you call mutt with -v:

katolaz@akela:~$ mutt -v | head -5
Mutt 1.5.23 (2014-03-12)
Copyright (C) 1996-2009 Michael R. Elkins and others.
Mutt comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `mutt -vv'.
Mutt is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `mutt -vv' for details.
katolaz@akela:~$

For further reference, you can go through this short howto:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html

I believe that some of the grief and anger felt by those who say they
"don't like the restrictions of the GPL" are due to such small
misunderstandings, which are, fortunately, easily curable :)

My2cents

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
[     @@)  http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia --  GPG: 0B5F062F  ] 
[ (@@@)  Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ  ]