<quote name="Tyler Romeo" date="2013-04-26" time="06:00:17
-0400">
MediaWiki is violating the license of third party
tools it uses.
This is not a clear fact, please don't express it like it is one. The
weird part about this issue is that reasonable lawyers can (and probably
will) disagree on this very topic. This is one of the biggest lessons I
learned while I was played a pretend lawyer for the last half decade
("Copyright Specialist" at University of Michigan, and then all my time
at Creative Commons); nothing dealing with (C) is certain, mostly.
There's a reason why the joke about a lawyer's favorite response is "it
depends"; because it is true! :-) It depends on the very specific
situational facts that would make up a case. And then, again, reasonable
minds will disagree. :-)
Now, the question of what MediaWiki developers should do to fulfill the
*spirit* of the GPL (or other FLOSS license of a third-party library we
use) is up for debate. But please don't make broad claims that anyone is
violating a license/copyright law. Assume good faith. I think the
MediaWiki developers, of any FLOSS developers, should be people we can
assume good faith of.
Greg
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