Re: Licensing Statistics (2001-09-08)

[Ben Bucksch]

Daniel Veditz wrote:

> I'll let the lawyers quibble with whether the GPL is "well defined", 
> but you can't knock it on the above grounds. The GPL *must* limit 
> combinations to licenses whose restrictions are a strict subset of its 
> own, or else sneaky people could craft a license with which they could 
> violate copyleft by putting impossible-to-meet extra restrictions on a 
> critical file or two.

What about requiring compatible licenses to meet the Free Software 
defintion or the Open Source defintion? Those are well defined in the 
legal sense and well defined in the sense of acceptance, I think. (The 
defintion would probably have to be included in the license, but that's 
not a problem.)

> It is probably legally impossible to define what kinds of "additional 
> restrictions" would be acceptable and which aren't while still 
> guaranteeing the goals of the GPL are met.

So, the terms Free Software and Open Source are void?