Henrik St?rner wrote:

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 04:34:34PM +0100, Jan Vojtko wrote:

...

Hi, we would like to use hobbit as the part of our monitoring system delivered to our customers.

You should read the COPYING file that comes with Hobbit, that is the official license text for Hobbit.

...

Can we do it?

That means you will be "distributing" Hobbit in the legal sense of the word, and therefore all of the terms of the GPLv2 license come into play. What this means is essentially that if you make any modifications to the Hobbit source code, then you must make these modifications available to everyone - e.g. by posting the source code to your modified Hobbit on a website. That includes any bugfixes, enhancements, custom add-ons and modifications etc. Anything except changes to the configuration files.

I am interested here. Say I work for a hosting company and I am selling dedicated servers. If I install the hobbit client on the server to monitor the server, am I "distributing" the code? Is this not more Software as a Service that was covered under GPLv3? Again this is just a point of interest for a Friday afternoon.

Cheers

Iain

You are also obliged to provide your customers with the source code to Hobbit if they ask for it, for a period of at least 3 years. And your customer is entitled to re-distribute Hobbit to others (if they want to do so, rather than just download it directly from Sourceforge).

Apart from that, you can pretty much do as you please. I would appreciate it if you would consider contributing something to the Hobbit developers (i.e. me) via the Paypal link on www.xymon.com, but there is no legal obligation for you to do that.

Regards, Henrik

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<snip>

PPS, I did do some work for a client a number of years ago (before hobbit, with BB) where we customised (read wrote a new) web interface. The bb client was stock standard and re-distributed, but the work on the server was never distributed, hence source code didn't need to be shared. This was basically to let each client login and see their own status, and nobody else's, and let the company configure/setup/delete/etc the clients monitoring/passwords/etc... Unfortunately, the company went bust, and I lost all copies of the work I had done...

I think this specific issue was one of the "loopholes" that GPL v3 hopes to close. Of course since BB was not GPL it will not apply. But as i understand it if you use GPL software to provide a service over the web and you have changed the source then you have to distribute (make available) the changes. As I see it there is no provision in GPL v2 for this.

And of course I am not a lawyer :)

Cheers

Iain

PPPS, and I am not a lawyer :)

Regards, Adam

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Hi Malcolm,

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:17:16AM +0100, Malcolm Hunter wrote:

I'm in the process of proofreading the documentation and wondering if I'm wasting my effort as it's currently still on version 4.2.3. Is the documentation due to be updated in the near future? Also, what's the best way to feed back any corrections?

I really appreciate someone doing proof-reading of my docs!

I haven't updated the docs for quite some time, but the best thing you could do would be to grab the documents from the Sourceforge Subversion repository - those are the current version, and the ones I would be updating.

I can setup commit-access to the repository if that is the easiest way for you to submit changes. If you would rather prefer, you can also just mail me the updated files and I'll commit the changes.

Regards, Henrik

PS: Does this have anything to do with KDE, or is it just a personal interest in Xymon ?