[The following is my analysis, IANAL.] On Thu, 2011-06-02 at 00:45 -0400, Richard Fontana wrote: > It is well understood in GPL culture that the original licensor of a > program is not bound by the "no further restrictions" > rule. Nevertheless, the use of a GPL-family license along with a > non-customary additional restriction violates GPL licensing norms, and > arguably creates fatal confusion for downstream distributors. To be a little more specific, putting aside the provision of GPLv3 that allows removal of additional restrictions (which seems a little dangerous), there are two possible interpretations in this situation: 1. The license to distribute granted by the GPL is unusable because distributors are unable to meet the copyleft condition that they convey the work under the GPL. (They can only convey it under the GPL as modified by the additional restriction.) 2. The original licensor intends to create a modified version of the GPL in which the copyleft condition refers to the modified license. In this case, the license may be free but it is GPL-incompatible: someone who combined the work with a second work under the plain GPL would be unable to convey the result under the GPL as required by the second work. #2 is something the licensor is entitled to do. If the licensor states this intent explicitly, I believe such a modified license should be considered on the same basis as any other new license, and not rejected out of hand because its construction as the GPL plus a restriction "violates GPL licensing norms". But just listing GPL and an additional restriction creates a great deal of confusion. I would treat this like any other case of unclear licensing in which Fedora demands an official clarification from upstream before accepting a package. > Let's assume that the "producer line" is some kind of brief author > attribution. What 7(b) is talking about is retention of author > attributions in *source code* of a covered work, or (within limits) in > user interface legal information displays for an interactive > program. It does not authorize requirements to retain functionality > that produces an author attribution in *output*. Moreover, there is > nothing I am aware of in GPLv2 tradition that suggests that similar > terms were ever considered GPL-compatible. Well, in some cases the output may be a derived work of the program. For autoconf, it clearly is. For file transformations in general, it depends on whether the manifestation of the program in the output reaches the threshold of copyrightability. If the portions of the program incorporated into the output are nonessential, one could remove them and the output would no longer be encumbered. > (The one glaring exception to > this is the license of Liberation Fonts; consider that license > grandfathered in unless and until we can ever get that license > changed.) What is more galling to me in that case is that the license falsely refers to 1(b) as an exception, as if to make it seem more benign than it is. An exception is by definition an additional permission that distributors are allowed to remove (e.g., in order to combine the work with a plain-GPL work). -- Matt _______________________________________________ legal mailing list legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/legal
