Re: GNU config (config.sub/guess) is now GPLv3 with additional permission
Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org> writes:
> * Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@hmh.eng.br>, 2013-05-31, 18:44:
>> As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you
>> distribute this file as part of a program that contains a configuration
>> script generated by Autoconf, you may include it under the same
>> distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program.
> So I can distribute this file under the terms of GPLv2, but only if
> $something. What about §6 of said license? (“You may not impose any
> further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted
> herein.”)
My understanding of the way this license provision works is that if you do
$something, you are permitted to relicense the file. Once you've
relicensed the file, the new license is in effect and you can forget about
the old license entirely, even if you stop doing $something. I think
that's the only way this *can* make sense, since the receipient of your
pure-GPLv2 distribution can reuse everything in that distribution under
the terms of the GPLv2; if they couldn't, then you wouldn't *actually* be
"includ[ing] it under the same distribution terms that you use for the
rest of that program."
That does seem to make the condition here pointless. I don't see any
reason why I couldn't include these scripts in a package licensed under
the Expat license, distribute that package, declare that I am accepting
this condition and distributing the config.{guess,sub} files under the
Expat license, and then take them from that distribution and do anything I
wish with them that satisfies the minimal terms of the Expat license since
I now have Expat-licensed versions of the files.
In other words, I don't get why the FSF didn't just use their standard
all-permissive license in the first place, like they do for the generated
configure script, since I think this trivially reduces to that.
It would be interesting to hear the opinion of FSF legal counsel on the
above.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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