On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 11:40:01AM -0500, Stephen Ryan wrote: > It is clear to me that Debian has been proceeding with something roughly > like the following: > > The legal documents (copyright notice, license) must be retained > verbatim in order for all of us to avoid being sued into oblivion. > Proper attribution (i.e., not misrepresenting anything about the > original author) is the only honest thing to do. Everything else should > be modifiable to suit, or else it isn't truly Free.
Actually, you're confusing things here. The legal documents, *as applied to a particular package*, must be retained verbatim. But the law itself doesn't prevent me from taking the GPL, modifying it, and using the modified version as a license for my own package. The GPL does, however, prevent this; and that is why I complained loudly about our stance on this sometime back. -- John
