Hi Howard, On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 07:26:06PM -0700, Howard Chu wrote: > > -----Original Message----- > > From: owner-openldap-devel@OpenLDAP.org > > [mailto:owner-openldap-devel@OpenLDAP.org]On Behalf Of Stephen Frost > > > Of those 15 licenses there are a few questions when it comes to GPL > > interaction. In the UoC license (Regents of the University of > > California Berkley) there is the infamous 'advertising clause'. The > > Regents have however, from my understanding, retroactively > > removed that > > clause from all of their licenses, at the request of the FSF. > > In the HC > > (Howard Chu) and PM (Pierangelo Masarati) there is 'should' do this > > and a 'should' do that. If those are to be interpreted as 'must' then > > they conflict with the GPL. 'should', however, can also be > > interpreted > > as a request, in which case there isn't a conflict. > For the licenses that I have explicitly used, clauses (2) and (3) both > include a "must" before the "should." The main point is that the origin of > the software MUST NOT be misrepresented, either by explicit claim or by > omission. If you can address the omission responsibility without providing > credit in your documentation, you're welcome to do so, though I find it hard > to imagine how this might be possible without having annoying credits listed > at runtime on every execution... As I understand it, the "must" requirement of your license is entirely GPL-compatible, as the GPL also stipulates that one may not misrepresent the origin of the work. The problem arises if we understand your license to require a specific interpretation of "misrepresentation by omission". If your "should" can be understood as a recommendation rather than a binding requirement, and you are willing to leave the final determination of "misrepresentation by omission" to the courts, I see no reason why this license couldn't be regarded as GPL-compatible. Please note that Debian is more than happy to respect your wishes regarding acknowledgement so long as we're distributing your code; the issue only comes up because the GPL imposes contradictory requirements that could prevent us from shipping LDAP-enabled binaries of many GPL applications. Regards, -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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