What is considered off-site usage?

[Dirk Dierickx]

At my workplace we're still having problems with the GPL licensed  
software, just now we had to take down a wiki because it was GPL  
licensed. Complete madness, but so far i have not been able to get  
through to our legal dept.

I continue to do research because i know there is not an issue but  
it's difficult to build a good case, especially against these legal  
types. When skimming through the GPL faq i found the following;

> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution

The part of interest is this;

"However, when the organization transfers copies to other  
organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular,  
providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution."

As we work with contractors a lot, local as well based in India, and  
legal has expressed their concerns with the GPL and contractors in  
specific, this faq entry is interesting.

It's important that 'off-site distribution' is defined correctly. A  
local on-site contractor will be no problem in this case, but do  
contractors based in India using the tool over a vpn connection fall  
in this category? The server is still ours, it's still our network, is  
this 'distribution'?

Thanks for your advice.

Dirk Dierickx
dirk.dierickx at gmail.com