On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 01:50:49PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote: > I'm not sure you've answered the question I meant to ask. Let me try to > rephrase: if debian-legal finds that such a requirement from upstream is a > legitimate clarification of the GPL (rather than an additional > restriction imposed on top of the GPL), do you think it's appropriate for > debian-legal to reject a piece of GPL software whose author imposes this > restriction, given that the GPL is explicitly grandfathered into the > DFSG?
You say "grandfathered" a lot :) I don't agree that DFSG#10 is a grandfather clause. It clearly lists those licenses as *examples* of free licenses, not as exceptions to the earlier guidelines. In effect, it tells us that an interpretation of the DFSG that would rule out the GPL is probably wrong. (However, I think the Artistic License was added to that list by mistake. IIRC, perl is distributed under a dual license because Ian Murdock asked for that, in order to be able to distribute perl as part of Debian. This predates both the DFSG and my involvement with Debian, though, so I don't know the details.) I can't answer your actual question yet, I'll have to think about it some more. In particular, I'd like to see your hypothetical actually resolved one way or another, and then we can look at the arguments that resolved it and see how far they go. > I think it is always appropriate to assume the license on a piece of > software is exactly what the copyright holder states that it is; if > nothing else, this avoids unnecessary lawsuits. If the GPL is involved, we should also make sure that the copyright holder isn't mixing the creatively-GPL code with real GPL code from other sources. Richard Braakman
