On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 09:17:21AM -0400, Kevin B. McCarty wrote: > My question is this: some pieces of code have an approximately BSD license > but with a no-advertising clause, such as the following: > > * Copyright (c) 1991, Visual Edge Software Ltd. > * > * ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Permission to use, copy, modify, and > * distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose > * and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above > * copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that > * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting > * documentation, and that the name of Visual Edge Software not be > * used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of > * the software without specific, written prior permission. The year > * included in the notice is the year of the creation of the work. > *-------------------------------------------------------------------*/ > > Is this GPL-compatible? If not, what would you suggest I do about it? Historically, this is regarded as a GPL-compatible license. The GPL-incompatible BSD-style clause is the one that *forces* you to publicize the name of the copyright holder in advertising materials. ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change Note that the University of California has retroactively stricken this clause from all of their BSD software, rendering all of it GPL-compatible. It's my guess that the license you have quoted is regarded as GPL-compatible despite what might at first blush be regarded as an "additional restriction" because the thing being restricted isn't the software itself, but the name of the copyright holder. In my assessment as a non-lawyer it isn't really necessary to include clauses like this in copyright licenses because the license doesn't grant permission to freely use the name of copyright holder in the first place; just free use of the licensed work. To provide a simple example, Linus Torvalds doesn't need to put anything in the copyright license of the Linux kernel to have recourse if Red Hat Software were to put his picture on the Red Hat Linux retail box with a caption that says "LINUS TORVALDS SAYS RED HAT IS PENGUIN-TASTIC!". Were they to do so, Linus would have legal recourse because his name and likeness are in no way the same entity as the Linux kernel. Red Hat and the general public have a license for the latter, but not the former. Because of this, in my opinion no-advertising clauses are dumb, and contribute to the widespread notion that you can and should bog down your copyright license with all sorts of crap that is utterly irrelevant to copyright law. However, as used by BSD-style licenses they are not a great evil, and they are widespread enough that there's not really any point trying to regard them as DFSG-non-free. The Free Software Foundation regards them as GPL-compatible, and I've never heard of any GPL-using copyright holder disagreeing with them on that point. I hope this helps! -- G. Branden Robinson | The first thing the communists do Debian GNU/Linux | when they take over a country is to branden@debian.org | outlaw cockfighting. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Oklahoma State Senator John Monks
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