Nathanael Nerode wrote: > The key point here was that the clause suffered from specifying means rather > than ends, which we have diagnosed as a major source of license drafting > errors. By restricting the functionality of the program and all derivative > works, it causes endless trouble. That perfectly describes my problem with the clause as written. > Instead, I attempted to rewrite this as a > restriction which could be imposed on the recipients of the license. > > So here it is: > "7d. They may require that propagation of a covered work which causes it to > have users other than You, must enable all users of the work to make and > receive copies of the work." > > This leverages the careful definition of "propagate" up top, so that it avoids > restricting any acitivities which do not require a copyright license. > > A restriction along these lines would mean that > (1) it imposes no restrictions on the *writers* of derivative works > (2) If you've already distributed (or offered to distribute) the work to all > its users (the normal case and the troublesome one for the original clause), > you have no additional obligations > (3) making the program available for users over the Internet (or on a local > server) -- if and only if that requires a copyright license, which it > probably does -- requires that you provide access to the source code to those > users, according to the usual GPL v3 clauses regarding distributing copies. > > What do other people think of this? It's sort of a forced distribution > clause, but it only forces distribution to the people you're already allowing > to use the program. If it's considered acceptable, we could push to have > this replace the proposed (7d). I believe this clause addresses the issue perfectly, and I agree with proposing it as a replacement. - Josh Triplett
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