>It's only illegal if Goldman distributed it, which they didn't. It's perfectly okay to modify GPL'ed code for internal purposes without open-sourcing the changes.
I'm not a lawyer but as far as I understand they were stripping the copyright notice, which is explicitly forbidden by the licenses. i.e. the MIT license:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
> The stripping clause only comes into place when you distribute the code, just as the GPL's copy-left requirement only comes into play when you distribute the code.
I absolutely wish this was the case: copying internally within an organization such as a school, a church, or a business should be legal for any purposes regardless of the license something comes with... However, I'd not be very certain of support of companies like Microsoft which would argue that their copyright licenses dictate usage within the organization and not just on distribution. And no, for these purposes there is no difference between Microsoft EULA and MIT license.
I'd imagine you can argue that you can argue that you are in compliance if you distributed a git (or hg etc) repository with an older version that does include the copyright notice though.
My point is just that at what point does distribution begin? The entertainment industry wants us to believe that if I buy a CD, I am violating copyright by the audio CD to an iPod (doubly so if to a friend's iPod).
The stripping clause only comes into place when you distribute the code, just as the GPL's copy-left requirement only comes into play when you distribute the code.
> The stripping clause only comes into place when you distribute the code, just as the GPL's copy-left requirement only comes into play when you distribute the code.
No, it doesn't. The stripping clause is a license condition with no limitation to distribution -- it expressly applies to all copies. Anything you need a license to do -- which is, anything that involves any of the exclusive rights tied to copyright (of which, the most prominent is copying, regardless of distribution) must follow it, barring an exception in the license or a some other provision of law that limits the applicability of the exclusive rights in copyright.
As well as the stripping clause of the MIT license, this is also true with regard to GPLv2 provisions related to copyright notices, which are required for both modification of GPL-licensed code and copying and distribution of GPL-licensed code, though the GPLv3 only applies this to copies that are "conveyed" (compare Section 2 of the GPLv2 with the combination of Sections 2, 4, & 5 of the GPLv3.)
Fair enough. Why does the FSF FAQ say you don't need to distribute source if you modify the code for internal purposes. Is it an explicit provision of the license?
I'm not a lawyer but as far as I understand they were stripping the copyright notice, which is explicitly forbidden by the licenses. i.e. the MIT license:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.