bashful: I wish you had merely raised this point with me first, rather than ispyisail. Given that ispyisail is compliant to exactly the same degree I am, and he isn't in a position to make changes to the main sections of this site which you are criticizing, as I am... addressing him first seems rather silly and unproductive.
You make a good point that it makes sense to include a notice that Gargoyle is released under the GPL on the download page. This has now been addressed (see the first paragraph of the source code section). However, the GPL is unclear about where the license information needs to be displayed for it to be considered compliant. The documentation section and the about section of this site have always made the license terms clear -- it's not exactly a secret. Here is the relevant language from Section (1) of the GPLv2:
You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
Just what constitutes "conspicuously and appropiately publish[ing]" a copy of the license? I think you could argue that including a description of this license and a link to it in each copy of the software in the System/About section, along with the details on the main website found on the About page, constitute conspicuous and appropriate publication.
Also, let's consider Debian, for a moment shall we? To the best of my knowledge the Debian Linux distribution is considered one of the most stringent in terms of compliance with open source licensing requirements. When I visit their home page I do see a
link to their definition of free software, which in turn links to several common licenses. However, there isn't a detailed break-down of per-package licenses there. No one does this. Likewise, there is no link regarding license of the downloaded software on
their download page -- the tiny license link at the bottom only pertains to the license of the code for the website. I am reluctant to put a lot of effort into providing per-package license documentation beyond the standards being set by the leaders in the free software community.
Of course, if you want to spear-head this project, by all means... you can create a detailed wiki page about the license of each package, which can be linked where appropriate. But that will take a lot of work...
I think ispyisail, above hits the nail on the head: There ARE real violators of the GPL out there, not distributing their modified source with their binaries. That is a MUCH bigger problem than how conspicuously license documentation is being displayed. If you want to start a crusade for license compliance, I suggest you start there.
