When my brother asked me for help setting up LinuxSampler, I noticed
that, because of a trick of legalese, the license actually forbids ALL use.
Basically, the problem is as follows:
1. The GPL allows use for any purpose so long as its restrictions are
met.
2. The GPL explicitly forbids any additional restrictions.
3. As the party bestowing the GPL with its power, you're applying an
additional restriction.
This means that, in plain English, you're saying "We grant permission to
use LinuxSampler as long as you can simultaneously obey these two
directives which directly contradict each other."
(It's the legal equivalent of "The next sentence is true. The previous
sentence is false.")
This is actually by design. You're not SUPPOSED to be able to use the
name "GPL" on anything that imposes additional restrictions.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary
You'd be able to resolve this by removing the relevant portions of the
GPL... but the GPL itself is licensed to you under terms similar to a
CC-BY-ND license. You can copy it around but modified versions require
permission from licens...@gnu.org and must have their name changed.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL
Also, your interpretation of linking libgig with LinuxSampler doesn't
agree with courts and lawyers who make the actual decisions, so the FAQ
answer is at odds with legal reality:
It's legal for YOU to compile LinuxSampler against libgig since you own
both of them, but it's illegal for ME to compile it because:
1. Regardless of the terms for LinuxSampler, you're offering libgig to
me under a pure GPL license.
2. The GPL forbids linking against anything that can't also be
distributed under pure GPL terms.
Again, this is by design. It's meant to prevent someone from taking a
GPL library and incorporating it into something under different terms.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL
(Though the solution here is much simpler. Once you've fixed the
LinuxSampler license, just say that people can have libgig under their
choice of the GPL or the LinuxSampler license.)
Finally, while it's not strictly relevant to what I just said, I just
wanted to point out that the "LinuxSampler is not open source, you are
evil!" FAQ entry feels a little bit like attacking a straw man.
It's probably correct for anyone who makes an ad hominem attack like
"you are evil!", but most of the people I've met who care about whether
something is open source are referring to whether the license is OSI
certified rather than the more colloquial definition.
...and the OSI will never certify a license with a non-commercial
restriction because it violates criterion #6 (No Discrimination Against
Fields of Endeavor) of their definition of open source.
http://opensource.org/docs/osd#fields-of-endeavor
Given how difficult it is to craft just the right legalese without
paying a lawyer, I'll keep my eyes open for a freely-usable license
that's sort of like the GPL with a non-commercial restriction, but I
doubt I'll find one.
(The Creative Commons BY-NC and BY-NC-SA licenses were written by
professionals and even they are considered rather toxic because of how
some jurisdictions consider "a blog which makes a few cents off Google
AdSense" as commercial enough to violate the license.)
Generally, if it's got the concept of source code (unlike Creative
Commons licenses) and it doesn't meeet the OSI criteria, it's just filed
under "proprietary" along with EULAs.
(The closest I've seen mention of is the old POV-Ray license and that
had enough flaws that, in 2007, they were considering a full rewrite if
their plans to re-licence the existing code to AGPL failed.)
--
Stephan Sokolow
Note: My e-mail address IS valid. It's a little trick I use to fool
"smarter" spambots and remind friends and family to use the custom
aliases I gave them.
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