[Fedora-legal-list] How to note 'GPLv3 with options taken'?
Richard Fontana
rfontana at redhat.com
Fri Aug 29 12:25:23 UTC 2008
On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:45:15 -0400
"Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> This is a result of:
> "If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you
> must place, in the relevant source files, a statement of the
> additional terms that apply to those files, or a notice indicating
> where to find the applicable terms."
Correct. In the case of the traditional
third-party-license-compatibility practice, this is taken care of by
inclusion of the non-GPL license notice in the relevant source file
(which might be the complete license text or a reference to some
license text contained in another file).
> I always recommend people put the actual terms rather than a notice,
> because "LICENSING" and "README.LICENSE" have a terrible habit of
> getting lost or forgotten, then I have no idea what exceptions you
> meant for this code to have, and I end up trying to find you in
> several years time and forcing you to remember the licensing to code
> you forgot you wrote at all. :)
More generally, I have found from experience that global licensing
notices (though important) should not be used to the exclusion of
licensing notices in individual source files. (In a paper I
co-authored,
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html
there is a footnote suggesting that top-level notices are preferable to
'file-by-file' notices; I no longer find this convincing.)
> >From a Fedora perspective, any package that add exceptions to the
> >GPLv3 should be
> noted in its license tag with:
>
> License: GPLv3 with exceptions
>
> or
>
> License: GPLv3+ with exceptions
>
> ... depending on whether the license attribution states v3 only or v3
> or later.
Perhaps additional permissions and additional requirements should be
treated differently (or maybe a special tag is needed only if there
are additional requirements?).
- RF
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