Stanislav Maslovski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 07:20:09PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > > > You are, as far as I can tell, free to obtain a verbatim copy of > > the GNU GPL as described in the specific license grant (e.g. > > "either version 2 of that License, or, at your option, any later > > version") and exercise the license under the terms you find there. > > One thing that I have to note also that after this standard header > the author writes: "For more details see the file COPYING." which is > the changed GPL.
That's not so good. (Referring the license recipient to the terms of the GPL via an included file is good; that they've violated the copyright on the GPL document itself is bad.) I would expect the explicit word of the license grant "For more details see the file COPYING" to indicate the explicit wishes of the copyright holder, and hence have significance in determining what the license is. It might be that, since the copyright holder has explicitly referenced that document for specific terms, you cannot legally just substitute the correct GPL document in place of their copyright-violating document. Of course, you cannot legally redistribute the copyright-violating document either. Certainly the best way to resolve this is for the copyright holder in the work to ship a verbatim GPL document as the COPYING file to which they refer. -- \ “Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” —Donald | `\ Robert Perry Marquis | _o__) | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
