On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 16:04 +0100, Michael Kjorling wrote:
On 2005-01-25 15:27 +0100, psychonaut@nothingisreal.com wrote:
Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.
IANAL & Co, but isn't this essentially what the GPL already says?
No, it's not - he's asking for the ability to relicence the work in the future under a non-free licence. The copyleft aspect of the GPL specifically prevents this.
The proviso above is definitely not GPL-compatible, so in that sense the poster is correct (I would say it's an extra restriction to the GPL). I *suspect* some might even treat it as a non-free licence - for example, the QPL does roughly what you want (#3.b) and although the FSF consider it a free licence, others don't.
I tend to agree with the FSF point of view, but just to make you aware that others might not agree.
Cheers,
Alex.