Quote:
Originally Posted by Stodder
Additionally, does it go against the GPL for an end-user to intentionally remove program metadata? I.e. taking out the "OpenOffice.org" references in an OpenOffice.org PDF?
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No.
The whole point of the GPL is so that people can't take programs that other people have written, make some change to them or incorporate them into something else ('wrapping' in particular) and make the resulting program proprietary. It's not about metadata, stylesheets, or anything else -- just about keeping people from taking a program, claiming it's theirs now, and saying if you want to use it, you have to pay them.
The details are more complicated than that (
all details are more complicated) but that's how it works out. Metadata doesn't come into it at all. It's just a license, and it just grants rights for what you can do with the source code. If you're not distributing binaries of a GPL-licensed program, it doesn't matter to you at all.
By the way, there's nothing "alleged" about it. The author of the program chooses to use the GPL instead of any of a number of other licenses available, as is his right, and so it goes.