Today's News: 6.6 & the copyright notice

Guest

I'm sorry to post this here, but I tried creating an account and was unable to log in using the name and pass I entered. It said "Incorrect Login" dispite several rounds of trying.

This is a response to today's news about not supporting 6.6. If someone with an account could successfully post it for me to the comments thread, I'd really appreciate it.

PNU

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<i>and removal of copyright information.</I>

This is the one that really gets me angry.

First of all-- I fully support FB and phpnuke. It's a brilliant program and I think people should be encouraged to give him public recognition on their phpnuke sites as they see fit. Myself, I keep his "copyright notice" down there as a way of giving props and thanks.

HOWEVER...

There is NO way PHP-Nuke can be GPL'd *AND* simultaneously restrict or control what any part of its generated output looks like. Think about it. If a GPL'd program could force copyright notices to appear visibly to the end user:

1. GPL'd printer driver authors could put a copyright notice at the bottom of every generated page as a watermark.

2. Video driver authors could put copyright notices at the bottom of everyone's screen, etc.

3. There would be no end to the number of copyright notices every GPL'd program could include. Running a game in GNOME could theoretically require copyright notices displayed from every game's designer, plus from GNOME's authors, plus the author of the GTK toolkit, plus the contributors to the Linux Kernel, plus the GCC compiler...

I challenge anyone to show where the GPL says restricting the modification of code to take out the copyright notice of a GENERATED OUTPUT (not the source code itself!) is allowed.

SECONDLY...

FB's notice-- "Web site engine's code is Copyright © 2002 by PHP-Nuke." is FACTUALLY INCORRECT in three different ways.

1. The "web site engine's code" would certainly have to include the code for PHP, Apache, the various modules PHP-Nuke uses such as GD, MySQL, etc. There's more to my "web site"'s engine than just FB's code.

2. "PHP-Nuke" is not to my knowledge a person or company and therefore cannot own copyright on anything, let alone itself.

3. Perhaps FB just wants to claim copyright for himself on his sizable contribution to the code. However, as PHP-nuke is a GPL'd, collaborative effort with bug-fixes and features (phpBB, for one) coming from various sectors and intermingling with his code, he can NOT claim sole copyright. Every line of code that he uses that came from someone else is still copyrighted by that person. For him to claim copyright on the entire web-site engine, even if he just means what he distributes via PHP-Nuke, is more than wrong-- it's plagiarism.

In short-- the copyright notice is PLAIN INCORRECT on the facts, and his insistence within the code that it can "not be modified" is equally wrong.

FINALLY--

I have to get this out of my system. I've been using PHP-nuke now for almost a month, and while I think I've tracked down and installed all the required security fixes on the MANY different systems that have contributed them, the fact that there is no "up-to-date" CVS tree for checking out bug-fixes is completely INSANE and SELFISH on FB's part. To have to find a secfix version 3 over here and a fixed mainfile.php over there and a blocks-remote-exploit fix in a third place is completely ridiculous.

Someone at the very least should create a CVS repository of FB's latest version so people can just grab the latest security fixes. No new modules or themes, just the most secure version of the latest release there is, without having to search the whole damn Web and hope we don't miss anything.

I for one promise to support any effort to maintain a up-to-date "6.5Secure" or "6.6Secure" or whatever version in CVS if someone hosts it.

Sigh. Okay, I'm done. Comment away.

General Joined: Mar 22, 2003 Posts: 5233 Location: USA

Did you receive an email to activate your account before you tried to login?

Posted: Sat May 24, 2003 8:35 pm

Raven wrote:

Did you receive an email to activate your account before you tried to login?

Nope, didn't get the email either.

I want to add/correct a couple things to the above...

1. There is an odd provision in the GPL (section 2c) about copyright notices being permitted on "interactive" applications. See http://phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4947 - The question of whether or not the notice has to be DISPLAYED vs merely included in source is not clear to me.

2. to clarify another point -- maybe "plagerism" is too strong a word-- but what do you call claiming copyright ownership over something you didn't necessarily write all of and for which you don't fully own the copyright?

General Joined: Mar 22, 2003 Posts: 5233 Location: USA

That's why you can't login. Try another register attempt. You may have had a typo in your email. Then you can copy and paste this all to the comments of the article. Thanks.

Nuke Cadet Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 1

I also had difficulty logging in after registration I was using RedHat 9 and Konqueror - I did manage it after many efforts using my son's Windows 98.