Notepad-plus-plus: GPL Issue: installer display of GPL 2.0 details are truncated

Created on 23 Mar 2018  ·  3Comments  ·  Source: notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus

Description of the Issue

The GPL v2.0 displayed in the Installer "Agreement" has been truncated - it omits the last section, specifically:

How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs

If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.

To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.

one line to give the program's name and an idea of what it does.
Copyright (C) yyyy name of author

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:

Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) year name of author
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
type show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; typeshow c'
for details.

The hypothetical commands 'show w' and 'show c' should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be called something other than 'show w' and 'show c'; they could even be mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program.
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written
by James Hacker.

signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice

This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License.

It may not be obvious to some but this last section is part of the license and as the opening part at the top makes clear:

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

modifying it - by omitting part of it is not permitted...

invalid

All 3 comments

@SlySven

the separator line END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html marks the end of terms and conditions.

this is followed by implementation guidelines named How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs.

if you fear that others can misinterpret this line, please contact https://www.gnu.org and ask them to put the section How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs into a separate page.

many thanks and best regards.

@MetaChuh , it appears the GPL police are out and about... OMG. Who has that much time on their hands??

Well I do get bugged by installers that demand I agree to the GPL before I can install an application - when it has no relevance to using the software but only on distribution of it to others...

It was a while ago but seeing any GPL licence mentioned in places where proprietary software puts in an EULA - that demands the right to take ownership of your first-borne - raises my Spidey-sense for these thing. :grinning:

Anyhow I may be wrong (sadly it does happen :woman_facepalming:) but in other cases I have always seen that last section included as well - (including, most recently in an "Licences" item in the UI for a Toshiba TV (made by Vestel) that I had to reinstalled the firmware in :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:) - I would note that those last three sentences in that part might be informative to users/developers/forkers...

:tada: Thanks for making this great editor though - it is brilliant to have a decent editor when I switch to a Windoze environment that handles text (source code) files that did not originate on or are not bound just for that OS and thus have a different line ending and do not have a stupid zero width no-break space in the first three bytes ...

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