* On 11/25/24 18:36, Daniel Hakimi wrote:
In that sense, the DCO itself and GPL itself are technically proprietary documents. This isn't a problem in practice, you should not modify these legal documents at home, that's a bad idea, and it's not a super important freedom to preserve.
To expand on that, this restriction is there for very pragmatic reasons: seeing a license text for $LICENSE $VERSION, you can be sure that it has the same (effective) wording as any other copy with the same parameters. If free modification was allowed, you'd have to essentially compare each document you stumble across to see if there are modifications and what they effectively mean/do.
In this case, the proprietary nature of license texts actually offers a layer of protection to users, which admittedly is weird to write in a FOSS context, but is obviously not mutually exclusive.
A parting remark regarding the "effective wording" I mentioned above: famously, the GPL 2 license text was modified in the past to update the FSF HQ address. While that was a modification in the purest sense, it didn't change any relevant text within the license body. Note that the document author is always permitted to change the text, even if that permission is not granted to the public/to users. Unfortunately, it also means that the license author can modify the license text in its effective wording without having to change any metadata (like the license version), but that's a shortcoming that can't easily be fixed. Practically, thankfully, this almost never happens (or at least I don't have any such occurrence in mind).
Mihai
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