On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 03:10 +0000, MJR wrote:
Alex wrote: The proviso above is definitely not GPL-compatible, so in that sense the poster is correct (I would say it's an extra restriction to the GPL). I *suspect* some might even treat it as a non-free licence - for example, the QPL does roughly what you want (#3.b) and although the FSF consider it a free licence, others don't.
I think you might be referring to debian?
I didn't think Debian had made up its mind on the issue.
Well, there are a few nasties in how the QPL interacts with some contract law and there's the ability of the copyright holder to make licensees spend a lot of money defending themselves in court, but fortunately most use of the QPL is scuppered by misapplication of it or other practical problems.
These are all different problems to the #3b clause. I'm talking about a clause which requires modifications to be distributed under a certain licence. If it requires you to use the same licence as you received the software, most people generally recognise that as being free. If it requires you to use a different free licence, some smaller proportion would see that as being free. If it required you to use a non-free licence, most would probably think that it was non-free (since you no longer have the right to share modifications, freedom 3).
I don't think any distribution has thought this issue through sufficiently to have any policy on it, esp. where the effect of selecting different licence effect is done via subclause - for example, while the DFSG#3 says 'must be under same terms as original licence', it doesn't say that similar clauses should be active also. Arguably, DFSG#3 was intended to block restriction on modification, which isn't necessarily the case where you're being asked to make you derivations available under a different free licence.
That said, it wouldn't surprise me if Debian or someone else decided that different treatment clauses like that were not "free" at some point, which was why I was warning the original poster that such a clause might cause trouble later.
Cheers,
Alex.