Feedback on free software licence requested

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 16:04 +0100, Michael Kjorling wrote:
> On 2005-01-25 15:27 +0100, psychonaut at nothingisreal.com wrote:
> > Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the 
> > additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you 
> > publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide, 
> > royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display, 
> > perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions 
> > thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as 
> > source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.
> 
> IANAL & Co, but isn't this essentially what the GPL already says?

No, it's not - he's asking for the ability to relicence the work in the
future under a non-free licence. The copyleft aspect of the GPL
specifically prevents this.

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 tend to agree with the FSF point of view, but just to make you aware
that others might not agree.

Cheers,

Alex.