Strange clauses in the Twidroid license

Martin Vilcans martin at librador.com
Tue Jun 8 13:55:04 UTC 2010


Hi, I'm new to this list, so I'm not sure that this is the right place
for this question, but here we go:

I read the license agreement for Twidroid, a proprietary Twitter
client for Android: http://twidroid.com/terms/

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the license text, but to me it
sounds like they may be infringing a copyleft license and are trying
to write themselves out of it. Quoting the suspicious parts of the
license:

"Under no circumstances shall source code of Twidroid be made
available to you by tomatic."

Why would they mention this in the license?

"If Twidroid is, or in tomatic’s opinion is likely to become, the
subject of a claim of infringement, tomatic shall have the right,
without obligation and at its sole discretion, to: a) procure for you
the right to continue to use Twidroid; b) replace or modify Twidroid
in such a way as to make the modified version of Twidroid
non-infringing; or c) terminate this License Agreement, /../"

This sounds like they have a plan for what to do if they are accused
of GPL violation. Does anyone have any idea of what other reason they
may have to include such as clause?

Regardless of the reason behind the clause, could such a clause be
used to avoid the copyleft? As soon as the company is accused of
violating the GPL, they revoke the user's right to use the software.
Since the user is no longer allowed to use the software, they no
longer have the right to get the source code. Is this a possible
loophole in the GPL?

Martin

-- 
martin at librador.com
http://www.librador.com



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