[hobbit] license question

[Adam Goryachev]

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Iain M Conochie wrote:
> 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.
>>
>> 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.

Actually, I was of the impression you are only required to distribute
(actually, just make available in a reasonable method) the source code
to the people you have given the binaries. AFAIK, you don't *have* to
distribute it to everyone. However, any person who you have given the
binary can request the source code, and can then re-distribute the
source code to any other third party.... ie, you can't restrict it, but
you don't have to help it be distributed....

> 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.

The question I would ask is are you installing a modified version of the
hobbit client anyway? I would think most people would install the
standard hobbit client with a couple of config settings/etc... maybe
custom ext scripts (which don't fall under the hobbit license anyway),
etc...

PS, not that I am suggesting people should not share any work they do!

PPS, I did do some work for a client a number of years ago (before
hobbit, with BB) where we customised (read wrote a new) web interface.
The bb client was stock standard and re-distributed, but the work on the
server was never distributed, hence source code didn't need to be
shared. This was basically to let each client login and see their own
status, and nobody else's, and let the company
configure/setup/delete/etc the clients monitoring/passwords/etc...
Unfortunately, the company went bust, and I lost all copies of the work
I had done...

PPPS, and I am not a lawyer :)

Regards,
Adam

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