Re: inquery about "GPL with commercial exception"

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org> writes:

> Francesco Poli dijo [Wed, Oct 07, 2015 at 11:50:53PM +0200]:
> > One cannot comply with all these conditions at the same time. The
> > "GPL + further restrictions" license is therefore
> > self-contradictory.
>
> Right. But a content creator (in this case, a software author) is free
> to choose whatever terms they see fit for their work. In this case, if
> what they come up with that best describes their intent is "something
> similar to the GPL, but adding a restriction to it to prevent
> appropriation in commercial settings", they are entitled to.

The copyright holder can claim that, and can still distribute the work
legally, because copyright law does not restrict them to comply with
those license terms.

Any recipient of the work, though, has no license in the work except
what the copyright holder grants. If the copyright holder's granted
terms are incoherent (“GPLv2 plus these restrictions” is not a coherent
license grant), then the terms are misleading because the recipient has
no valid license under copyright law.

> And yes, expressing it as "GPL + restrictions" is unfortunate

It's more than unfortunate, it is actively misleading (though whether
that is intentional or not is still unknown). It gives the strong
impression the recipient has some license to exercise some freedoms from
copyright restriction, when in fact they have none.

-- 
 \       “Come on, if your religion is so vulnerable that a little bit |
  `\           of disrespect is going to bring it down, it's not worth |
_o__)               believing in, frankly.” —Terry Gilliam, 2005-01-18 |
Ben Finney