Re: Interpreting the GFDL GR

[Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>]

Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> writes:

> After going over the debate leading up to the vote, I think that the
> most honest and least polemic interpretation of the winning GR would
> be as follows:
>
>  a) The effect of the GR is to change our standards of interpreting
>     license terms for a piece of software that include a clause that
>     appear to aim at preventing a licensee from circumventing a
>     requirement to distribute source by distributing source in a form
>     that it would be particularly cumbersome or illegal for a
>     recipient to use according to the freedoms otherwise provided by
>     the license.

[snip very good explanation]

> We could go all the way and start interpreting _all_ of all licenses
> according to the licensor's intent rather than the literal meaning of
> the license text, but I think that would be dangerous and extremely
> undesirable, so we should not start doing that _in general_ withtout
> _explicitly_ being instructed by the Developers By General Resolution.
> Therefore my proposal is to narrow the licensor's-intent principle to
> clauses of the general kind that are problematic in the GFDL. The
> description in point (a) above is my best attempt to define such a
> "general kind" of restrictions without being too much a GFDL-specific
> exemption.

I think your suggestion is the best chance at making sense of the GR
that I've seen so far, but I would make one change: it *should* in fact
be applicable only to the GFDL.  One could interpret the GR as a
judgement call on the part of the developers that we will give the FSF
the benefit of the doubt in this case.  As such, it's not reasonable to
extend that same benefit to other licenses or license authors without
another GR that covers those cases as well.  After all, the GR was
specific to the GFDL.

Of course, some other licensor using the GFDL might decide to interpret
such clauses more literally.  But it's probably reasonable, short of
evidence that someone is actually interpreting the license in this way,
to extend other licensors who use the GFDL the benefit of the doubt as
well.  I don't mean reasonable in the sense that I personally think it's
a good idea, but in the sense that it's a reasonable conclusion to take
from the GR.


Disclaimer: As there's been at least one comment about radical non-dd's
            hijacking d-l, I feel I should mention that IANADD.  Maybe
            someday, when I feel I have the time to commit to it, but
            not at the moment.

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03