boblq wrote: > On Friday 19 August 2005 12:18 pm, John H. Robinson, IV wrote: > > > > *THE ADVERTISINBG CLAUSE IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE GPL* > > > > Of course the FSF is going to fix this problem. They have successfully > > gotten people to change from the 4 clause BSD license to the 3 clause > > BSD license (the latter being GPL compatible). WHen that fails, a fork > > of the code or a re-write of it. > > I am ignorant of most licensing details, so ... > > What is the reason the GPL is incompatible with advertising?
The GPL prevents adding on extra restrictions, except for a copyright notice when the program is run interactively. The advertising clause is an extra restriction. > Hmm, does the GPL cover documentation? Yes, if the documentation was licensed under the GPL. If you make a program with documentation, and tarball the whole thing and say ``this tarball is released under the GPL v2'' and include the LICENSE in the tarball, that documentation is covered under the GPL. Please note: there is a significant number of people (myself included) that believe that the GFDL is a *non-free* license. RMS believes that *pure documentation* requires different (less) freedom than code. Others, myself include, understand that documentation can be code and vice versa. They both need the same freedoms. > How about advertising of various forms in the documentation? Depends upon the license the documentation is released under. If you say that the code is GPL, and the documentation (a separate tarball, or even just some files that are specified) is GFDL, then you can include the (non-free) invariable sections. However, the invariable sections cannot be germain to the subject of the documentation itself. cf: RMS's GNU Manifesto being an invariant section of the GNU Emacs Manual If you want to know more than you ever want to about licenses (and probably run away scared) lurk on debian-legal for awhile. I ran away scared after a bit myself. -john -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
