Re: License question: GPL+Exception
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.
I'm surprised that Red Hat have produced an inconsistent licence and I'm
surprised that GPL+restrictions isn't widely-known as non-free.
Hope that explains,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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