[hobbit] license question

[Iain M Conochie]

Henrik St?rner wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 04:34:34PM +0100, Jan Vojtko wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>> we would like to use hobbit as the part of our monitoring system delivered 
>> to our customers.
>>     
>
> You should read the COPYING file that comes with Hobbit, that is
> the official license text for Hobbit.
>
>   
>> Can we do it?
>>     
>
> That means you will be "distributing" Hobbit in the legal sense of the
> word, and therefore all of the terms of the GPLv2 license come into play.
> What this means is essentially that if you make any modifications to
> the Hobbit source code, then you must make these modifications available
> to everyone - e.g. by posting the source code to your modified Hobbit
> on a website. That includes any bugfixes, enhancements, custom
> add-ons and modifications etc. Anything except changes to the
> configuration files.
>   

I am interested here. Say I work for a hosting company and I am selling 
dedicated servers. If I install the hobbit client on the server to 
monitor the server, am I "distributing" the code? Is this not more 
Software as a Service that was covered under GPLv3? Again this is just a 
point of interest for a Friday afternoon.

Cheers

Iain

> You are also obliged to provide your customers with the source code
> to Hobbit if they ask for it, for a period of at least 3 years. 
> And your customer is entitled to re-distribute Hobbit to others 
> (if they want to do so, rather than just download it directly from 
> Sourceforge).
>
> Apart from that, you can pretty much do as you please. I would
> appreciate it if you would consider contributing something to
> the Hobbit developers (i.e. me) via the Paypal link on
> www.xymon.com, but there is no legal obligation for you to do that.
>
>
> Regards,
> Henrik
>
>
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