[wp-hackers] Licensing and Copyright Issues with the Hello Dolly Plugin

[hakre]

> Von: Mark Jaquith <markjaquith at gmail.com>
> An: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, den 15. Dezember 2010, 21:06:29 Uhr
> Betreff: Re: [wp-hackers] Licensing and Copyright Issues with the Hello Dolly 
>Plugin
> 
> On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 12:31 PM, hakre <hanskrentel at yahoo.de> wrote:
> > In the related ticket #15769[2]  lead developer markjaquith wrote[3],
> > the distribution of the code is  intended for "non-commercial" and
> > "educational" use.
> >
> > If  the use of the plugin is really limited to non-commercial and edu-
> >  cational use, then this would be incompatible with the GPL as you can
> >  not restrict commercial use of GPLed code.
> 
> I said *no* such thing. I said  "The purpose is non-commercial and,
> yes, educational." In context, it should  be clear that I am talking
> about the purpose and rationale behind its  *existence*, not
> establishing restrictions on its *use*.

Please don't feel offended. Read my words, we're not far away from each 
other:

I wrote "Intended" you wrote "Purpose".

Then I wrote "IF the use of the plugin is REALLY limited". That's hypo-
thetical. If you would have written about a concrete limitation you can bet 
that I would have reacted as concrete to it - not hypothetical.

> It's bewildering  that you'd
> jump to such a bad faith interpretation of my  words.

What I think is more important then to assume bad faith is 
to think about the implications this has if the lyrics cause restrictions 
of any kind to the GPLed code.

It has been distributed to millions of sites of which I assume most of 
it's users do not want to violate others license and instead want to 
be able to use wordpress under the GPL in a non-violating way.

That's just very bad news for all users incl. the ones who are developers.

> Regarding copyright and fair use — I weighed in already. This is  not
> an appropriate place to debate the matter.

Sure, as the regulars all know that the selection of the Hello Dolly Lyrics was 
and is a personal preference by Matt Mullenweg and is not related to 
anything educational. It's just Matt's hobby. He loves jazz. It's a specific 
text he wanted to have in there. I think that's the whole story behind the 
Hello Dolly lyrics. That's where the plugin has it's name from even.

That's why I would have never argued for fair use.

For the reality we share and in a publicly viewable space, I can only suggest 
to take care and fix this. Seriously. And with the best intentions.

-- hakre

http://hakre.wordpress.com/