What's CCS entail? [LWN.net]

What's CCS entail?

Posted May 23, 2014 11:35 UTC (Fri) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642)
In reply to: What's CCS entail? by welinder
Parent article: Collaborative GPL enforcement

welinder wrote:

If they did that by hand when they created the firmware, then it is not part of the CCS.

The above is simply not correct. scripts includes any human-target instructions. The word doesn't necessarily mean a shell script; it could mean a script that the human must “act out” to control compilation and installation.

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What's CCS entail?

Posted May 23, 2014 15:20 UTC (Fri) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (2 responses)

it could mean a script that the human must "act out" to "control compilation and installation".

Wow, as IANAL, that really sounds like stretching it. I can understand the desire to acquire these instructions along with the code, but claiming that's what the license requires is dishonest. Since the license doesn't require what you want, you play with the definitions of words to get what you want?

The GPL license was written for coders and in collaboration with coders. If you survey some coders, I am certain that a large majority will say that human instructions are not scripts.

In fact, what GPLv2 really requires is "complete corresponding machine-readable source code" and GPLv3 "machine-readable Corresponding Source". The word "script" only appears in a clarification of what "source code" includes. Can you really say with a straight face that your definition of "machine" includes humans?

Even the gpl-violations.org FAQ says under What are "scripts used to control installation"?

[...] The process of installation is often automatized by installation scripts. [...]

[...] But when reading and interpreting the license, it is clearly understood that the license doesn't specifically only mean "scripts", but any kind of software programs that are required to install a (modified) version of the compiled program.

Am I missing something?

What's CCS entail?

Posted May 23, 2014 16:50 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

What if, included with the human instructions, they provide a robot which performs said actions?

Also, "machine-readable"…`cat` can "read" everything. Maybe "machine-executable" would be better?

What's CCS entail?

Posted May 27, 2014 13:37 UTC (Tue) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link]

The gpl-violations.org FAQ is only a statement of what the folks who run that site believe.

The intent of the license is clear that the goal is to perform compilation and installation. Whatever instructions are needed to get that done are what's required.

If it were any other way, then everyone would just memorize their list of build commands and say GPL didn't require them because they'd never written them down. I doubt a judge is going to find that acceptable compliance. Judges hate when defendants do manipulative things to circumvent a license.