Hi Jilayne, hi all, thank you very much for the comment. This is exactly what I was told from a very well-known Lawyer here in Germany.
Only some final words about the statements from Eric: " Your beliefs about IP law are excessively rigid; this is a common form of superstition among hackers. In reality, the move from a GPL header to an SPDX tag is legally innocuous because it has what a court would call "no inequitable consequences" - that is, nobody's interests are measurably damaged by it." ... "I am not a lawyer, but I am a subject-matter expert who has consulted with lawyers. I will now express an opinion: It is *highly unlikely* that a court will ever find any change of open-source license actionable, with one possible exception: changes between reciprocal (GPL-style) and non-reciprocal licenses. But from a court's point of view the difference between (say) BSD and Apache would be very much de minimis non curat lex." Personally I do not believe that my beliefs in this case are to rigid, because this was already discussed with a lawyer, who is an expert in copyright law before I posted it on the mailing list. Furthermore Jilayne is of the same opinion. And secondly, in Germany there are actions from a copyright holder enforcing his copyright with, lets say, very uncommon arguments. Due to this I disagree to " that is, nobody's interests are measurably damaged by it" and "It is *highly unlikely* that a court will ever find any change of open-source license actionable". Ciao Oliver > On Nov 23, 2015, at 8:50 AM, Fendt, Oliver <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > Thanks for sharing this. > I'am wondering who should use the tool? > In my opinion it can only be used by the copyright holders of the single > files where the standard license header shall be replaced and not by any > other person. > It might be picky and you might say, hey that is something equivalent, but > the GPL-2.0 for example says in chapter 1: > ..."keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the > absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy > of this License along with the Program."... > > If you as a "non copyright holder" of a OSS package replace the standard > GPL-2.0 header by (let's say) "this is licensed under GPL-2.0" In my opinion > you have violated the GPL, because of the chapter 1. > > You can argue "that there is no violation because it is just another notice > for the same thing", _but_ at least you have removed the phrase: > " This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, > but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of > MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the > GNU General Public License for more details." > > Which is an element for the standard GPL-2.0 header, and this is for sure a > GPL violation because of "keep intact all the notices ... to the absence of > any warranty". I do not want to violate the GPL, you? > If you are not the copyright holder and do not have the copyright holder's permission, then I would not recommend removing a notice, especially in this case (i.e., GPL, has specific notice, has requirement to retain notices, etc.) - both from a legal perspective and as good practice. If you are the copyright holder or have the copyright holder's permission, then you may choose to do otherwise. Jilayne (I am a lawyer, I'm not your lawyer, your lawyer may say something different) _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
