Hi all, The Maxima team is having difficulty reconciling the requirements of this letter: <http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/maxima-doe-auth.gif> with Maxima being GPL compatible. The letter states that "the previous paragraph should be included in the GPL and should accompany other modifications, enhancements or derivative works of your program". That paragraph states (also see /usr/share/doc/maxima/COPYING1):
"Distribution of such derivative works is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (Title 15 CFR 768-799), which implements the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, and/or the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, of 12-6-84, (Title 22 CFR 121-130), which implements the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2728) and may require license for export." With a very liberal interpretation of Section 8 of the GPL this could be read as an explicit geographical distribution limitation as if written in the body of the licence. A significant issue is that the limitation is not the result of restriction by patents or by copyrighted interfaces. Another approach that I suggest may be the preferred solution is to incorporate this paragraph into the preamble of the GPL as a mere clarifying statement/information about then-existing US law. As it would not form part of the licence it would not make the licence GPL incompatible. But it would still honour the ESTSC requirement that the paragraph be included in the GPL. So now I've hit an issue that Branden has recently raised about the FSF designating their non-legally-binding preamble as invariant: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOmitPreamble Can I omit the preamble of the GPL, or the instructions for how to use it on your own programs, to save space? The preamble and instructions are integral parts of the GNU GPL and may not be omitted. Please use the entire GPL. In fact, the GPL is copyrighted, and its license permits only verbatim copying of the entire GPL. The preamble and instructions add up to some 5000 characters, less than 1/3 of the GPL's total size. They will not make a substantial fractional change in the size of a software package unless the package itself is rather small. In that case, you may as well use a simple all-permissive license rather than the GNU GPL. Is there a way we can add this information to the GPL Preamble for Maxima when the FSF is claiming that only verbatim copying of the entire GPL is permitted? It looks like this hints at a possible solution: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL You can use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another license provided that you call your license by another name and do not include the GPL preamble, and provided you modify the instructions-for-use at the end enough to make it clearly different in wording and not mention GNU (though the actual procedure you describe may be similar). If you want to use our preamble in a modified license, please write to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> for permission. For this purpose we would want to check the actual license requirements to see if we approve of them. Although we will not raise legal objections to your making a modified license in this way, we hope you will think twice and not do it. Such a modified license is almost certainly incompatible with the GNU GPL, and that incompatibility blocks useful combinations of modules. The mere proliferation of different free software licenses is a burden in and of itself. Would Debian legal be open to a "Maxima General Public License" that is identical to the GPL in the body of the licence but where the Preamble is replaced with text that reads something like this (US spelling): Preamble The license body of the Maxima General Public License is identical to the GNU General Public License and thus intended to be compatible with the GNU General Public License. The Free Software Foundation's Preamble has been replaced with the following paragraph about US Export Administration Regulations as directed by the Department of Energy and the Energy Science and Technology Software Center on 6 October 1998: "Distribution of such derivative works is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (Title 15 CFR 768-799), which implements the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, and/or the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, of 12-6-84, (Title 22 CFR 121-130), which implements the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2728) and may require license for export." The letter setting out the above paragraph is available from <http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/maxima-doe-auth.gif>. To understand why this license was renamed and the Free Software Foundation's preamble omitted please read <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL> and <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOmitPreamble>. This preamble is for informational purposes only. One must always comply with local laws when distributing works permitted by a software license. I am also mailing [EMAIL PROTECTED] to see if they would like to provide some input. I hope follow ups will be made to the Debian legal mailing list. Regards, Adam Warner
