Re: A Free GFDL?

[Lewis Jardine <debian@catbox.co.uk>]

Emmanuel Colbus wrote:

> 1) Is it legal?

I can't answer that one (and even if I could, I'd probably be wrong or 
overlook something). If you're planning on using this license for 
something important, you should probably see a contract lawyer with 
qualifications in French and American law.

> 2) Is it free?

My French is not wonderful, but if 9 does indeed allow relicensing under 
the GPL in all situations, then I think a document under this license 
would be DFSG-free: it's my understanding that as long as a work has one 
set of terms that is Free, a it is considered to be Free, even if it can 
additionally be licensed under terms which are not.

(Example: GPL's section 3c is non-free, as it forbids commercial 
redistribution. This isn't a problem though, because 3a (which is free) 
can be used instead).

If it can be GPLed only under certain circumstances, then we have to 
look at the GFDL+permissions license, which I don't think I'm qualified 
to do.

> 3) Do you find some concerns into it?

Clause 13 appears to be a mandatory upgrade clause: there doesn't seem 
to be any way to license a work under version 1.0 only. Upgrade clausing 
in the license is comparatively unusual: it's most often seen in 
asymmetric licenses like the NPL, where it can be used to grant 
additional permissions to the license author that they might have 
forgotten about. Authors may be concerned that the author of this 
license can arbitrarily relicense their works

The more common way of doing an upgradable license is to not mention 
upgrading in the license at all, but rather in the copyright statement 
for the work; this way any author that does not want their work to be 
upgradable can simply use a different copyright statement.

Example: the GPL's suggested statement of '...under the terms of the GNU 
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; 
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later 
version.', which can be replaced by '...under the terms of the GNU 
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; 
version 2 of the License only.'

--
Lewis Jardine
IANAL, IANADD