Have you read the GPL? It uses fairly simple language, no legal jargon, and it's a lot shorter than some EULAs I've seen. I imagine a lot of people just mentally file it under 'legalese' and skip over it, but even a "simplified" GPL wouldn't prevent that.

There are and continue to be wild disagreements over GPL and what it means. Is linking against a DLL considered a derived work? It depends on who you ask! Stallman thinks yes. Others think no.

Isn't that a vagueness in copyright law itself? You could avoid the vagueness by making the GPL stricter and more explicit, but that seems like the direct opposite of 'simplification'.

It tends to be considered so by the people that write the GPL'd software. That's why the LGPL exists.

If you're looking for a way to use someone's software components against their wishes, and just looking for a legal way of doing so, then you may be right.

If you actually want to respect the wishes of the author OTOH...

Making it more something regular people can read and understand would mean more arguments by lawyers (real and wannabe) over how far bits of it can be stretched.

I agree that it is better than many EULAs, but that doesn't make it simple. At roughly 5000 words with a reading ease grade level of about 15(Flesch-Kincaid) it is not a document for the average person.

Doesn't even mean I disagree with most of the license, but it is unreasonable to expect people to understand it.

That's a fun game to play. Go to a local Linux users group meeting. Borrow somebody's Debian DVD (someone always has one) and install on your laptop. Wait a year. Look that person up and demand they mail you the source for the exact binaries you installed a year ago.

They have no obligation to do that. They can just send you links to the source.

You would certainly be making their lives difficult for no reason, in terms of tracking down software revisions. I guess if that's fun to you then ... whatever.

There have been kerfluffles in the past where people (companies) did exactly that. Gave someone a binary, then told them to download the source from somebody else. People got angry.

Yes. But Debian wouldn't be angry if you pointed to them.

In the past, it's been business entities that have distributed considerable a number of binaries (I believe one case was with code running on a router?) -- and charged quite a bit for that (bundle) -- and yet been too cheap to host a copy of the code online.

Usually those companies were shipping modified versions, and/or it wasn't possible to build your own modifications for the device. I don't recall an instance - though it may well just be that I'm ill informed - where "people got angry" just because a company wasn't mirroring something.

I wonder if any LUG attendee has ever hesitated to give somebody else a Debian disc for fear of that happening.

I suspect not.

You as a recipient of software can never demand the source code. That right is reserved for the copyright authors. At most, you can go and complain to the copyright owner, and they in turn can demand that the distributor provide source code.

That's an odd example. In that case, im pretty sure the teacher, who apparently has no idea about programming, could simply direct the parent to the website of the creators of this GPL software, where the source is available.

Must be my age showing. When I was in school internet access wasn't common so if we needed to exchange software it was on floppy disks.

Me too. There was no software of I'm any school I attended, ever. We had Minecraft on cartridge for the IBM PcJr., Oregon Trail for the Apple IIe, and that's about it. Even if my parents had asked for the source code to the janky lemonade stand game we played, the answer would have been the same - write the company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license is as simple as it gets.