FSF about Copyright notice and GNU GPL

[Carsten]

Hi all,

I looks like as everybody is allowed to remove the copyright notice "powered by Coppermine" without violating the GNU GPL.

See http://www.phpnuke.de/article146.html

To make it clear - I do not intend to remove this remark in my Coppermine installation.

But I think that for example hyperion was wrong in http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=2636.0
GNU GPL 2c does not fit in this case.

Regards, Carsten

Edit:
I guess in 1.4 the footer could be changed so that it is protected by 2c.
See http://www.phpnuke.de/article149.html

[Joachim Müller]

We've discussed this in the past, so here's only a quick resumee: the removal of the "Powered by Coppermine" tag in itself is not a breach of the GPL, but: a project is allowed to add their own license terms to the terms of GNU GPL as long as they don't defeat the purpose of the GPL in itself. We have talked this over with the OSI team, they back up our point of view. Concllusion: coppermine is being released under GNU GPL plus an additional license agreement that says you mustn't remove the "Powered by Coppermine" tag (nor obstruct it by e.g. formatting it in the same color color your background is in).
Imo phpnuke is not an authority, with it's license terms being somewhat questionable (after all it's a one man project with many adoptors), and it's not very helpfull that the link you've posted is in German only - the rest of the dev team won't be able to read it.
There are other apps that are released under GNU GPL that have a similar licence model as coppermine (GNU GPL plus copyright notice in place), e.g. Typo3.

[side-note]
As an authority, I'd rather trust http://www.opensource.org or the fsf than a german spin-off of a much-debated project like phpnuke...
[/side-note]

Joachim

[lamama]

I looks like as everybody is allowed to remove the copyright notice "powered by Coppermine" without violating the GNU GPL.

I don't know if it's clever to attach it to this thread, but anyway...

A german CPG support board (coppermine-galerie.de/forum), run by this boards user "Sigi44", is propagating the above on his board and is encouraging others to remove the "powered by Coppermine"-Line on their installations.