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Re: Endorsements



On Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 12:19:22PM -0700, Walter Landry wrote:
> Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 03:20:22PM -0700, Walter Landry wrote:
> > > > As noted elsewhere, I'm planning on a "GPL conversion clause".  This
> > > > would permit the omission of the endorsements notice.
> > > 
> > > If I can convert it to the GPL, then I don't care what the license
> > > says.  Heck, I wouldn't mind the GFDL as long as I could just convert
> > > it to the GPL.
> > 
> > That's not exactly what I mean by a conversion clause.  See one of my
> > other recent replies in this thread.
> 
> There are so many, I don't know which one you're referring to.

Yeah, sorry.  In any case, I need to stop using the term "conversion
clause".  That is not actually what I am trying to accomplish, as I
realized after doing some major hair-splitting with Steve Langasek.

I was referring to this:

	When this work is incorporated into a different work that is
	licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2, as published by the Free
	Software Foundation, reproduction of the endorsement section
	immediately after this work's copyright notice is optional
	instead of mandatory when those notices appear as part of the
	work licensed under the GNU GPL.

> In any case, I don't think that anyone is saying that the original
> copyright mysteriously disappears when it is distributed under the
> terms of the GPL.  But practically, that is what happens.

Only as long as the DFCLed work is bolted onto an independent GPLed work.
(It is not the intent of the license to make this bolting difficult.)

> People can make non-trivial changes and release the result under the
> GPL, without endorsements.

Correct.

> In fact, we don't want them to include the endorsements, because the
> document has changed.

That's true.  But we do want them to retain the endorsements boilerplate
which lets people know that the author may not approve of the work being
distributed, unless they are distributing the work as part of a GPLed
whole, in which case the boilerplate is optional instead of mandatory.

> Making modifications and distributing the result is the only thing
> that really matters here.

Well, okay, but the devil is in the details.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |      "To be is to do"   -- Plato
Debian GNU/Linux                   |      "To do is to be"   -- Aristotle
branden@debian.org                 |      "Do be do be do"   -- Sinatra
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |

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