Re: GPL-compatible, copyleft documentation license
On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 10:50:35PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> Well, I used to think that myself, until Steve Langasek and Henning Makholm
> argued me to exhaustion. :)
>
> Debian interprets "this License" and "herein" to mean the conditions of
> the GNU GPL expressed in its text; no more and no less. We interpreted
> the PHP-Nuke author's additional restriction as just that, with the
> consequences you'd expect from the above. In our assessment, PHP-Nuke
> isn't licensed to the public at all (as far as we can tell), and we
> cannot distribute it -- even in our "non-free" archive.[1]
>
> If you really feel you're right about this, I invite you to take up
> Henning's and Steve's challenge.
I don't think we need to come to a strong agreement on this, anyway. A
copyright holder can certainly take the GPL, modify its text directly
(instead of patching it out-of-line with riders), and use the result, as
long as he removes the preamble (in order to comply with the GPL's
metalicense).
The significance is simply that it's clearly possible (to my understanding
of the terms governing modifications to the GPL) to use the GPL with modified
terms, even if riders aren't a good way of doing so, which changes the
result from "you can't do that" to "you're doing it wrong".
Modifying the license in this way would help avoid the confusion typically
associated with "GPL + extra-restrictive riders", too.
(I also still suspect that distributing a work under the GPL with additional
restrictions, linked against LGPL works such as glibc, would be in violation
of the former license. If my interpretation is correct, this would probably
render "Hydra" undistributable, even in non-free.)
--
Glenn Maynard
Reply to: