On Dec 13, 2003, at 23:09, Alexander Cherepanov wrote:
The hole in the explicit wording seems to be so clear that I start doubting it is just an oversight. Maybe it's normal for sections of a license to trump each other?
If one section of a legal document is more specific than an other, it is normal to follow the more specific one. So, if GPL 3 covers a specific modification, and GPL 2 covers any modification, and you do that specific modification, you follow section 3, not section 2.
In general, you don't interpret a legal document to make an entire section irrelevant. A court should ask, What did the FSF intend by putting in a section 3? And they will come to the answer: If you distribute object code, you must follow section 3.
The only time I think they would allow otherwise would be if the copyright holder distributed object code under the GPL. I don't know what they'd do then.
