GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 671138
About dialog contains scary warranty disclaimer in copyright string
Last modified: 2014-10-20 03:17:20 UTC
Created attachment 208792 [details] Screenshot of the Contacts about dialog, with scary warranty disclaimer I'm attaching a screenshot of the About dialog for the Contacts application. Its copyright string includes the standard warranty disclaimer, in all caps, which could create an unhappy first impression. I have not noticed any other core applications putting this disclaimer in their copyright text.
Also, I believe license text is usually included in the dialog — not behind a web URL.
That text comes from Gtk.AboutDialog objects, is not put there because we put it there but because of the license type. The GPL 2, as it say on the license (and the page), provides no warranty at all.
Yeah, this is a standard feature of the gtk+ about dialog. Other apps like GEdit gets it too,
Ah, sorry about that. I didn't realize there _were_ others :) Do you think we should send this over to Gtk, then? The text is still rather jarring, and I'm not sure if it's friendly with the HIG (which pushes very strongly for using either sentence case or title case). I know it's important legal text, but it's also the About dialog - not exactly a far-off place.
You could try to talk with the Gtk+ devs, but I think this is not about the toolkit, or the scary warranty disclaimer. I think this is more a legal issue, than anything else, as I said before, that's how is stated at GPL 2.0 license (here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html)
background: we cannot include the whole license inside the About dialog, and we cannot translate the license for legal reasons (the translation would not have the same legal stance, unless it's been done by lawyers and went through the license creator approval). for these reasons, we only show the preamble, which can be translated, and we send you to a website that shows the whole license and, possibly, approved and legally binding translations of the license. we may be able to tweak the preamble, but this is really legalese, so it has to be discussed in a larger venue, and I don't think it's the gtk+'s team call on this. for more information on the previous discussions about the license in the about dialog, see bug 336225.
I think we should consider replacing the all-caps use in the string, even if we don't change the wording.