Copyright notices and the GPL

Having had someone asking about removing the “Powered by sendcard” credit from “sendcard”:http://www.sendcard.org/ recently I’ve been thinking about the copyright/Powered by notices that many scripts display, and the requirements many of them make.

Take “PHP-Nuke”:http://www.phpnuke.org as an example (it was a different one I encountered yesterday, but this one nicely illustrates the problem). PHP-Nuke has copyright and license notices at the bottom of every page on the site. If you wish to remove them the author of PHP-Nuke would like to you to “buy a commercial license”:http://phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=Commercial_License for only $300. It appears that the author interprets this passage of the GPL to include copyright notices in the HTML templates:

bq. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program’s _source code_ [emphasis added] as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.

My understanding of the passage above is that it is talking about the source code, and how the credits in the code should remain in place, because they are held under the license and copyright of the author. The visible part of the website _is not bound_ by this part of the website - it’s not the code.

While I agree that it’s better if users leave the visible copyright notice, and understand that in the world of free software selling licenses to remove the copyright is one way to recoup the cost of the time spent on the script (I’ve done the same thing with sendcard - “Yes of course you can remove the credit, but a donation would be very much appreciated”) it is a misrepresentation of the GPL to insist that people must pay to do so.

Plus the GPL itself states:

bq. Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License

It could be argued that a web based script is a form of interactive program, and therefore should output the copyright/license notice on each page.

“phpbb”:http://www.phpbb.com agrees that it is within your rights, and have an article in their “knowledge base”:http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article.php?article_id=8 on the subject. It is good to see that they understand the GPL doesn’t cover the _visible_ copyright, but protects the copyright notices _in the code_; but I would appreciate a more lenient stance over moving the notice to a separate credits page. I mean, most desktop software (on Windows) has the credits hidden in the ‘Help->About’ menu, not appearing as soon as you run a feature that uses someone else’s code, and I like to group all credits for a site together on one page - it just feels neater, and IMO makes the site look more ‘official’ and not just tacked together from free scripts like any script kiddie does.

Why has this situation come about? I believe it to be because of the one feature so common in the open source community (no, I don’t mean poor documentation): ego. The desire to be known, to have everyone praise you for what you have written, to have hundreds of people using your script. The best way to do that is to have a visible link to your site.

Here endeth the rant.