IRC Services Manual - Copyright notice and disclaimer

# IRC Services Manual

## Copyright notice and disclaimer

IRC Services is copyright (c) 1996-2009 Andrew Church. There is absolutely NO WARRANTY provided with this software, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and noninfringement; in other words, if it blows up in your face, you get to clean up the mess. While the author has made reasonable efforts to avoid errors in this software, it is written and distributed as a hobby, and as such the author provides no guarantee that it will function correctly or that it will not cause direct or indirect damage in any particular circumstance.

IRC Services is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 2, and may be freely redistributed, with certain limitations described in that license (notably, if you distribute IRC Services or any portion of it at all then you must distribute the source code as well). You are not required to accept the license if you will only use IRC Services privately; however, if you do not accept the license, international copyright law forbids you from copying or distributing IRC Services.

#### A note on the explicit use of version 2 of the GPL

The GPL is published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) [`www.fsf.org`], which occasionally releases new versions of the license to deal with ambiguities or new legal issues. The FSF recommends that software which uses the GPL specify that "any future version" may be used in place of the provided license, both to give users of the software the choice to use such "corrected" versions, and to avoid difficulties that can arise when multiple individuals or organizations contribute to a project--if such contributions are licensed under a particular version of the license and only that version, the project maintainer would have to contact each of the contributors for permission in order to apply a new version of the license to the project as a whole, a task which can be time-consuming at best, and impossible at worst.

I have chosen to license Services under only version 2 of the GPL for two reasons:

- Simplicity of dealing with licensing issues when a new version of the GPL is released. Using a single version avoids the hassles of having to deal with two (or more) interpretations of licensing terms.
- Because all of the source code is mine. As discussed in section 6-3 and FAQ Z.8, I rarely accept code from others, and when I do I require that all rights be transferred to me; doing this ensures that I will be able to release Services under a new license (a new version of the GPL, or potentially some other license) in the future if necessary.

Developers who intend to modify Services and distribute the modified version should be aware of this; if you accept submissions of source code from others, and don't require a transferral of rights, it would behoove you to ask that the submitted code be licensed under the GPL version 2 "or any future version" to avoid potential legal problems.

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