license question 🔗 link

Hi,
we would like to use hobbit as the part of our monitoring system delivered 
to our customers. Can we do it?

Thanks and Regards
Jan


Jan Vojtko
Professional services Project manager
COMPAREX CZ s.r.o.
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On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 04:34:34PM +0100, Jan Vojtko wrote:

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.

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

Henrik St?rner wrote:

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

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Iain M Conochie wrote:

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....

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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<snip>

I think this specific issue was one of the "loopholes" that GPL v3 hopes to close. Of course since BB was not GPL it will not apply. But as i understand it if you use GPL software to provide a service over the web and you have changed the source then you have to distribute (make available) the changes. As I see it there is no provision in GPL v2 for this.

And of course I am not a lawyer :)

Cheers

Iain

Hi Henrik,

I'm in the process of proofreading the documentation and wondering if I'm wasting my effort as it's currently still on version 4.2.3. Is the documentation due to be updated in the near future? Also, what's the best way to feed back any corrections?

Regards,
Malcolm

-- 
Technical copy-editor & proofreader

KDE Proofreading Team
KDE British English Translation Team

http://l10n.kde.org/team-infos.php?teamcode=en_GB

Psssst! Schon vom neuen GMX MultiMessenger gehört? Der kann`s mit allen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/multimessenger01

Hi Malcolm,

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:17:16AM +0100, Malcolm Hunter wrote:

I really appreciate someone doing proof-reading of my docs!

I haven't updated the docs for quite some time, but the best
thing you could do would be to grab the documents from the
Sourceforge Subversion repository - those are the current
version, and the ones I would be updating.

I can setup commit-access to the repository if that is the
easiest way for you to submit changes. If you would rather
prefer, you can also just mail me the updated files and I'll
commit the changes.


Regards,
Henrik

PS: Does this have anything to do with KDE, or is it just
a personal interest in Xymon ?