On 9/19/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
Just a small question, but wouldn't using it to power a website that others use constitute distribution and trigger the viral license?
Not according to the interpretation of the Free Software Foundation, as explained in the GPL FAQ at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html. A separate license endorsed by the FSF, the Affero GPL, more or less adds this restriction, saying roughly that if you use modifications to serve data on a network you have to release those modifications as well.
The interface, however, would have to be released under the GPL if it's derived from the base MediaWiki interface, or so I understand it. The same is in all likelihood true for in-house JS libraries and so forth. Given that, I've often wondered whether the same must not apply to content -- if we were more careful about copyright we would probably write that as an exception into our licensing terms, for the interface files at least. It's definitely not intended to apply to content, though (which would put Wikipedia in violation, since the GFDL is not GPL-compatible!), so you might take that as an implicit license even if technically we should have a special exemption.