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I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

code.mendhak.com

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Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#21

Post by cormorant »

Different addresses are stated in different copies of the license. https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0 has: "59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA"

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt has no postal address.

https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html has "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA" in red italics, and says: " Text in red is replaceable (see Matching Guidelines B.3.4). License or exception text will match to the text for the specified identifier if it includes a permitted variant of this replaceable text. The permitted variants can be found in the corresponding regular expression as shown in title text visible by hovering over the red text."

Which in turn says: "can be replaced with the pattern .{54,64}" (that is, any string between 54-64 characters long).

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#22

Post by sgarland »

remram wrote: post #10
diggan wrote: post #4

> The first thing that came to attention, the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm. I completely forgot that the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier. I guess I shouldn't be surp…

Yes all paper is usually letter. It's close to A4, so you don't usually need to reformat documents to print on one or the other. Most printers take A4 and US letter and adapt automatically. A4 is readily available in the US but not commonly used. The main problem is that if you cut it in half, you get a really silly sizes (too narrow) instead of A5.

> Most printers take A4 and US letter and adapt automatically

I found out that they do not automatically adapt to JIS sizes. My wife’s work once had a printer that somehow got configured to use JIS, I assume JB5. It then refused to print on US Letter, but as printers are wont to do, didn’t produce any useful error message, nor relay this information to the computer. It just wouldn’t print. I only discovered this (because if you work in tech, you must know how to fix printers, right?) by laboriously scrolling through every menu on the tiny LCD screen, and finding that the paper settings were incorrect.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#23

Post by sanderjd »

diggan wrote: post #4

> The first thing that came to attention, the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm. I completely forgot that the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier. I guess I shouldn't be surp…

How is this "confusing"? I don't think I've ever thought about paper size a single time in my life.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#24

Post by 3np »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #3

Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).

Sending physical mail is one thing. I no longer consider myself "digital native" after reading this:

> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#25

Post by int_19h »

diggan wrote: post #4

> The first thing that came to attention, the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm. I completely forgot that the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier. I guess I shouldn't be surp…

Like most other weird things in US that pertain to measurements and units thereof, letter-sized paper predates the A-series standard (which originated in Germany). FWIW the latter didn't became an ISO standard until late 20th century.

Americans are just very obstinate about those things. It's like the Windows of metrology - backwards compatibility trumps everything else, even when you have utterly bonkers things like ounces vs fluid ounces.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#28

Post by munchler »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #18

This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author. I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash c…

> flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes)

These are called “index cards” in the US, although you can certainly use them to make flash cards if you want. Source: Am old enough to have used index cards unironically.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#29

Post by int_19h »

sanderjd wrote: post #23
diggan wrote: post #4

> The first thing that came to attention, the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm. I completely forgot that the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier. I guess I shouldn't be surp…

How is this "confusing"? I don't think I've ever thought about paper size a single time in my life.

I think GP is referring to the name - "letter" implies that it's the standard paper size used for writing letters specifically, as opposed to printed documents (of course, in US it's really both).

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#30

Post by bluGill »

At least he got a response. Meaning the address didn't change mostly.

A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.

The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".

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