Wesley J. Landaker <wjl@icecavern.net> wrote:
On Saturday 12 May 2007 16:01:25 Francesco Poli wrote:
> You may not impose any further restrictions with respect to the *rights
> granted by the GPL*. But there are already such restrictions, and you
> cannot remove them because you are not the copyright holder.
> Hence you cannot comply with the license and the work is
> undistributable.
A licensee can't, but the copyright holder can. Their license is NOT the
GPL, but GPL + exceptions & restrictions. That is perfectly valid, just not
GPL compatible. The exception they have adds extra freedom, and I believe
the one restriction they add is DFSG-free. [...]
First, I think b is not an exception but a restriction.
Adding any restrictions to plain GPL results in an invalid licence as in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/05/msg00303.html
That isn't much different to using the plain GPL with an OpenSSL-like
licence - both licences are DFSG-free, but we can't satisy both of them
simultaneously without additional permission on the GPL side. Of course
a copyright holder of the entire work could still copy and distribute
and so on because they don't need a licence but we can't because we
can't satisfy both of those restrictions simultaneously.
The copyright holder could make a new licence out of the GPL, as
permitted by the FSF, but they have not done so. I think they should
use the plain GPL, because I dislike licence proliferation.