Re: Is libreludedb DFSG compliant?
Josh Triplett wrote:
Marco Franzen wrote:
Josh Triplett wrote:
Mickael Profeta wrote:
If you link LibPreludeDB against other code all of which is itself
^^^^^^^^^^^
licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2
dated June 1991 ("GPL v2") or compatible, then you may use LibpreludeDB
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
under the terms of the GPL v2,as appearing in the file COPYING.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This looks fine to me.
What if I don't want to link it? I may want to [...]
With the above I have no license to do any of that. I am not even
sure I am allowed to make a private copy (jurisdiction dependency?).
Hmmm. When I read this statement, I interpreted "link" broadly here, in
the sense which includes combinations with other code that do not
necessarily involve invoking a linker.
When I hear someone talking about the GNU GPL, compatible licences
and linking, I expect them to talk about differences between it and the
GNU LGPL, about shared libraries and so on.
> Furthermore, I read it not as
"you must link it with GPL or compatible software in order to be used
under this license", but as "for all software linked to it, that
software must be GPL or compatible", making it still vacuously true that
the software is GPL if linked with nothing else.
That may well be what they mean, but it is not what they say. (That is
probably just a bug in the grant.)
Thus, the statement
seemed compatible with (and redundant given) the GPL.
Yes, likely they mean just to restate parts of (what they think)
the GNU GPLv2 itself says or means.
In that case they should not refuse to just grant the GNU GPLv2
directly. If they did refuse then that would be suspicious.
> If either of
those two assumptions was not the intended reading of the statement,
then I agree entirely with your argument that the statment renders the
software non-free. In any case, yes, the simplest solution is to avoid
making such explanations in a form that makes them look like additional
conditions of the license.
- Josh Triplett
Probably neither "linking" nor "compatible" has a clear enough meaning
to be used without further explanation in a meaningful licence grant.
Let's hope they'll adopt the standard boilerplate (ideally also avoiding
mentioning the name of the software in the grant as the last minor nit).
--
Marco
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