On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 04:47:08PM +0200, Radovan Garabik wrote: > > Except that the GPL itself says: > > > > Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies > > of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. > > > > Oops. > > so the GPL text itself is not DFSG compliant? > Oops. This is a FAQ, sortof. No the GPL is not itself DFSG-compliant, but also no it does not have to be because it never could be in any meaningful context. Because it's a license document, you as not the Copyright holder _cannot_ modify it without being in violation of Copyright laws dictated by international treaties. Since the software cannot be distributed without its license, we're stuck here. Most licenses have themselves no license of their own, meaning you have no rights whatsoever. The GPL is an exception in that it grants right to distribute it beyond GNU programs using it (and license your own stuff under it. The reason for not allowing modifications is clear: The FSF does not want the kind of dillusion which accompanies "BSD license", which can be intended to mean everything from a MIT license to an X11 license to a FreeBSD license to an original BSD license. All very different, all have different language and different restrictions. Yet because they happen to be very similar, and because many of them share root of the BSD license, they tend to get lumped together. How many different variants of the GPL do you want to sift through, given the compatibility issues which already exist between the canonical version and otherly licensed software? Whether or not the text of the GPL should be modifyable to make other non-GPL licenses or not is irrelivant since you're free to interpret the license and write it out in your own words for your software, IMO. This is not at all like writing code. If you want to fight this battle, have fun doing so, but you're not likely to see the support of the project behind you doing it. Certainly you've not got mine. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> What're you looking at? <cj> no! problems in M$ software? <cj> "Thoroughly bugtested" * Dabb grins. <LordHavoc> rewrite that as 'Thoroughly buginfested'
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