Re: GPL-compatible, copyleft documentation license
Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>:
> * Branden Robinson:
>
> > In the copyright holder's understanding, re-imposition of the
> > requirements of sections 2a and and 2c by those creating a derivative
> > work is not allowed, since those restrictions never attached to this
> > work; see section 6. This work can be combined with another work licensed
> > under the GNU General Public License, version 2, but any section 2a and
> > 2c restrictions on the resulting work would only attach only due to the
> > copyright license on the work(s) with which this work is combined and for
> > which those restrictions are in force.
>
> Isn't this at least a bit self-contradicting? Why produce such a mess
> in the first place?
To me it seems potentially useful to release licensees from those
requirements.
> Your license doesn't give me permission to publicly perform the work,
> or to broadcast it. It doesn't deal with moral rights at all (which
> are quite important in some jurisdictions when it comes to
> non-programs).
As I understand it moral rights are not portable in the way that
copyright is, so it might not even be possible to deal with moral
rights without hiring a huge international team of lawyers and
producing a multilingual licence the size of a small book.
However, if you know of a good portable way of handling moral rights,
broadcast and public performance please suggest some appropriate
language. I'm currently trying to draft a general-purpose non-public
licence for application to non-software so I'd be interested in any
precedents you can produce.
> It doesn't special-case distribution of printed
> copies, which means that the GPL provisions apply. These provisions
> pretty much rule out small-scaleprinting and redistribution because of
> the "valid for at least three years" rule.
I don't think that's a huge problem in practice. If you tell the
people to whom you give the hard copy that they must download the
source within the next 48 hours, then that probably counts as giving
them the source. If you're selling the hard copies then you can
probably afford to include a CD. (I'm told that producing the inlay
card of a music CD costs more than producing the CD itself. Unless
something ghastly happens digital media will probably continue to get
cheaper relative to hard copy.)
> However, the license does
> clarify what constitutes source code, but this might also be a further
> restriction in the GPL sense, making the license incompatible with the
> GPL.
It says what the copyright holder regards as source. I think it's
fairly clear that this clarification is not intended to modify the
terms of the GPL.
> All in all, I don't think this is a particularly good license for
> documentation, it's just yet another GPL variant.
Perhaps the word "proviso" should be replaced something like
"additional permission" to make it even clearer that this licence is
compatible with version 2 of the GPL.
I think there's a typo in this line, by the way:
> > 2c restrictions on the resulting work would only attach only due to the
Reply to: