Florian, On Friday, November 29, 2024 1:22:07 AM MST Florian Weimer wrote: > * Soren Stoutner: > > The GFDL with Invariant Section is not the right comparison. The correct > > comparison is to the GPL (which has the exact same wording). > > The FSF gives permission to make modified versions of the GPL, > though: <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL>
That is a good point. Basically, that FAQ is a list of what your legal rights are under fair use of copyrighted material. At the top of the GPL it states: "Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <https://fsf.org/> "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.” Althought not explicitly stated in this text, the meaning is this: "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed, **except at fair use provisions of copyright law allows you to make changes without our permission**.” The FAQ at the link you listed above explains when the FSF will not attempt to enforce their copyright claims and restrictions on changing the text. One argument is that they are here granting you some rights you haven’t previously had. But the other argument is that they are just explaining what rights you already have under fair use (these actually vary by jurisdictions, so aren’t necessarily the same in all parts of the world). "You can legally 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 modify a copyrighted text under fair use, you have to distinguish it in such a way that nobody confuses it with the original text, and nobody thinks it was produced or endorsed by the original party. One aspect of that is you must change the name. Just like your ability to do this isn’t spelled out in the GPL itself, but is granted to you by copyright law’s fair use provisions anyway, these same fair use provisions also apply to the DCO, even though they aren’t spelled out there. My purpose here is not to try to explain when you have a fair use to modify a copyrighted text without the permission of the copyright holder. If someone wants to have that full discussion, I would recommend they start a new thread for that. But as a starting point, I would recommend that you read over the Wikipedia page on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use The rest of the text in the FAQ explains why they discourage you from doing this even though you can: "It is possible to make modified versions of the GPL, but it tends to have practical consequences.” "If you want to use our preamble in a modified license, please write to <licens...@gnu.org> 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." "Rather than modifying the GPL, please use the exception mechanism offered by GPL version 3.” There is one other paragraph that explains that you can request explicit copyright permission in a way that goes beyond fair use, but there is no guarantee they will grant it (handled on a case-by-case basis): "If you want to use our preamble in a modified license, please write to <licens...@gnu.org> for permission. For this purpose we would want to check the actual license requirements to see if we approve of them." -- Soren Stoutner so...@debian.org
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