Hello,
It appears that the easiest way to solve many license incompatibility
problems involving the GPL and other free licenses would be to add a
new version of the GPL, since that would not be difficult (unlike
rewriting huge projects) and because the people who actually have the
power to do that support our ends (unlike the KDE team and Troll).
Most of these suggestions have been opposed on the grounds that the
virality issue is an important one to the FSF and / or to the entire
Free Software movement and that therefore it should not or can not be
removed.
I suggest that the virality clause be limited, not removed, and
/allow/ including GPLed software in non-GPLd software as long as all
the non-GPLd parts of the program are distributed under a Free Software
license.
This could be done by including or referring to a list of criteria
that describe the essential properties of Free licenses, or a list of
explicit license names or content managed by the FSF.
Of course, any GPLd code that would be in any such composite work
would still be under the GPL and it would not be legal to redistribute
it or its modification under any other license, Free or not.
This would not only solve the immediate problem (KDE/QT) but also help
us avoid any such potential problems in the future, especially
considering the increasing number of companies who write their own
Free licenses. It would also eliminate one of the main arguments of
GPL opposers: that GPL supporters demand that other Free Software
licenses be compatible with the GPL, but that the GPL itself is not
compatible with anything but the GPL.
Of what I understand, there are two purposses to the virality of the
GPL: to give other Free Software an advantage by allowing only them to
use GPLd libraries, and to avoid the loophole of making proprietary
enhancements to GPLd programs by adding them in a dynamic library.
If this change is made, Free Software will still have the advantage
over proprietary software, as it would still be illegal for
proprietary software to link to GPLd libraries. It would also still
avoid the loophole: although you could add indirect enhancements to
GPLd software through non-copylefted Free Software licenses, and then
make those enhancements proprietary, it would no longer be legal to
link these proprietary enhancements once they are no longer covered by
the original non-copylefted Free license.
In short, such a change would allow all the interoperability we need
within the Free Software community while addressing all the practical
and moral issues that called for the virality clause in the first
place.
One problem I can think of with this suggestion is that it would no
longer encourage the use of the GPL (which many consider a better
license) over other Free licenses. But since all of the non-copylefted
Free licenses are compatible with the GPL (I think! Am I wrong?), this
suggested change would could only encourage the use of other
copylefted licenses. And it appears to me that copyleft is the main
issue with other Free licenses. Any way, I think that is a small price
to pay.
Please CC replies to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Adi Stav
