Re: Request for GR: clarifying the license text licensing / freeness issue
* Ian Jackson:
> I disagree with this position. See Fabian Fagerholm's explanation.
> For a strong copyleft licence like the GPL it's particularly
> troublesome if people go around making minor edits: all of that code
> is licence-incompatible with all unedited-GPL code. So the FSF have
> worked to prevent that by using the copyright on their licence text
> and I don't think that's unreasonable.
So in practice, authors add additional permissions and conditions as a
GPL commentary. The actual license is a GPL derivative in a
functional sense, but probably not in the copyright sense.
> The status quo is quite fine and should be left as it is.
>
> If this is forced to a GR we should have an option along these lines:
>
> We note that many license texts are copyrighted works, licensed only
> under meta-licenses which prohibit the creation of derivative
> license texts.
>
> We do not consider this a problem.
I think it should be made more clear that "derivative license texts"
means actually that, and does not include derivatives that are created
by patching of some other license.
(Nothing in this message should be interpreted as support for any GR
proposal.)
Reply to: