On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 04:50:38PM -0500, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Mon, 03 Mar 2003, Branden Robinson wrote: > > According to (2)(c) of version 2 of the GNU GPL, the only "code which > > announces" anything that you're not allowed to remove is the > > copyright notice and the warranty disclaimer. > > There are four things that you are not allowed to remove: > > 1. copyright notice > 2. warranty notice > 3. redistribution under these conditions > 4. how to view license > > which I've marked in a portion of 2c) below for reference. Point taken. I managed to overlook this, possibly because IMO (2)(c) needs another layer of nesting to enumerate these components. :) > > to print or display an announcement including an (1) appropriate > > copyright notice and a (2) notice that there is no warranty (or > > else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may (3) > > redistribute the program under these conditions, and (4) telling > > the user how to view a copy of this License. > > > > Strictly interpreted[1], that does not include a statement of the > > license terms, or a reference to same. > > I'd argue that '4' includes a reference to the terms of the license. > [It's always been my understanding that the > > You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License > along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software > Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA > 02111-1307, USA.[1] > > clause (or similar) is the reference to the license required by '4'] I agree that that's a reasonable and canonical interpretation of '4'. My concern is with alternative interpretations of it, given that some people here are advocating quite liberal stretching of the term "interactive" to accomodate PHPNuke. I'm wondering what the consequences of such elasticity are for other parts of (2)(c), and how anyone can justify applying such elasticity to one part of (2)(c) but not any other part of it. I think there also may be some possible complications with the "redistribution under these conditions" and "how to view license" retention requirements when someone is licensing under an effectively modified version of the GNU GPL (be it with additional restrictions, or additional permissions). Obviously if one is "forking" the GPL in such a manner, such notices have to be updated to mention the license that "really applies". And in the case of the GPL with extra permissions, does one need to go into detail about which chunks of the Program are licensed under the regular GPL, and which under the GPL plus the extra permissions? Consider again my example of "Branden's Annoying-utils", a fork of GNU coreutils that aggressively spews (2)(c) notices when the programs within in are "normally" used. What if I add copyrightable changes, and license them under the GNU GPL plus an extra permission clause? > Of course, if you're saying that the copyright statement doesn't > include a statement of the license terms or a statement of how to get > the license, that is my understanding as well. I am saying that, yes, but I did overlook part of that sentence in (2)(c). -- 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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