Topic on Project:Support desk

Is licensing notice required for third-party websites using MediaWiki?

6
George Ho (talkcontribs)
Malyacko (talkcontribs)

The content of the GPL itself should tell you whether a licensing notice is required. Whether that's for MediaWiki or any other software under GPL. How does "certain sites" make sense here?

George Ho (talkcontribs)

Well... The legal codes of ver 2 and of ver 3 are very long, so I don't know whether a notice is required. As for "certain sites", well... I should have said "third-party" sites earlier for clarity.

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

I have never heard of a requirement to notify users of a website what software licenses you are using. As far as I know, there is no requirement that says you have to say "we use MediaWiki" if you use it on your site.

The classic 4-clause BSD license (not used much any more) does require some notification, but that was deemed to be too onerous.

George Ho (talkcontribs)

@Malyacko, MarkAHershberger: Correct me if I'm wrong. However, I re-read the License, including sections 1 and 4, saying that a copy of the License must be visible to others and distributed and that every website must have a copyright notice containing a link to the GNU General Public License. Copyright has a copyright notice for the software, and summary from FreedomDefined.org seems to say so.

2001:16B8:10F3:5B00:75D1:31FA:176B:7ECC (talkcontribs)

I used to work for a project, which developed a software product, that was then licensed under the GPL and we also had such a discussion. As far as I remember the result was that the licence only affects how the software may be used and distributed.

It however does not affect the output, which the software is creating.

With other words: The GPL cannot be used to force users of the software to have a certain "copyright notice" or anything like that in the output of their actual website. Users in fact are free to modify the output the way they liked. In our case the result was that some users could even remove a copyright notice, which our software printed out by default and that was totally fine.

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