Clause 7d (was Re: Ironies abound (was Re: GPL v3 draft)

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>]

Well, I did devise a potentially Free alternative for the infamous clause 7d 
after an hour or two's thought.

The key point here was that the clause suffered from specifying means rather 
than ends, which we have diagnosed as a major source of license drafting 
errors.  By restricting the functionality of the program and all derivative 
works, it causes endless trouble.  Instead, I attempted to rewrite this as a 
restriction which could be imposed on the recipients of the license.

So here it is:
"7d. They may require that propagation of a covered work which causes it to 
have users other than You, must enable all users of the work to make and 
receive copies of the work."

This leverages the careful definition of "propagate" up top, so that it avoids 
restricting any acitivities which do not require a copyright license.

A restriction along these lines would mean that
(1) it imposes no restrictions on the *writers* of derivative works
(2) If you've already distributed (or offered to distribute) the work to all 
its users (the normal case and the troublesome one for the original clause), 
you have no additional obligations
(3) making the program available for users over the Internet (or on a local 
server) -- if and only if that requires a copyright license, which it 
probably does -- requires that you provide access to the source code to those 
users, according to the usual GPL v3 clauses regarding distributing copies.

What do other people think of this?  It's sort of a forced distribution 
clause, but it only forces distribution to the people you're already allowing 
to use the program.  If it's considered acceptable, we could push to have 
this replace the proposed (7d).