Re: Question about DFSG and a THC project
>>>>> "Anthony" == Anthony DeRobertis <asd@suespammers.org> writes:
Anthony> On Apr 22, 2004, at 17:39, Sam Hartman wrote:
>> Copyright 2003 by the Evil Empire, Inc. This software can be
>> redistributed under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2., with
>> the exception that it may be linked against the OpenSSL toolkit
>> even though doing so would be a violation of the GPL. Binaries
>> resulting from such linking may also be distributed.
>>
>>
>> That's clearly a very sloppy license. If we interpret it
>> literally, the first party (author) grats this license to
>> second parties. But when these parties distribute, they only
>> grant the GPL rights to those they distribute, because that's
>> what the GPL says happens.
Anthony> No, the GPL says you (the distributor) may place no
Anthony> additional restrictions above the GPL.
No, quoting clause 2 B of the GPL:
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
At least for modified works, people are granted only the rights under
the GPL. So if you are being literal in your interpretations, if you
are going to amend the GPL as a license, your amendments also need to
make it clear that the derived works are under the new license not the
original GPL.
I will admit that I thought this was true for all works not just for
modified works. So in my original example, you could actually
continue distributing the original program that contained GPL plus an
OpenSSL exception. However, if you modified the work, you were not
obligated to pass along the OpenSSL exception. It's not actually
clear you even had the necessary rights to do so.
--Sam
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