Interesting. Is there any restriction on people calling non-GPL software "GPL"? I mean, is GPL a trademark? Should it be?
From: Jason Clifford jason@uklinux.net Newsgroups: uk.comp.os.linux Subject: Re: Smoothwall GPL - not quite licensed under GPL Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 13:21:21 +0100
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I am aware of this. 0.9.8 installer was released under GPL. The COPYING file for 0.9.9 beta prefixes the standard v.2 GPL with:
===================== excerpt starts=========================== SmoothWall GPL is licenced under the GNU GPL.
Portions of SmoothWall, including the installer and the ADSL management utilities, are licenced under modified licences which are available on application. No modifications to either the installation libraries or binaries and re-distribution of modified binaries based on the installer is permitted without the owners permission. The owners of this code are Lawrence Manning (lawrence@smoothwall.org) and Daniel Goscomb (dang@smoothwall.org).
The rest of SmoothWall GPL are licensed under the GPL, which follows: ===================== excerpt ends===========================
This is a departure from previous licensing policy on the face of it.
I find the fact that they chose to include it in the GPL terms file a bit trite as well but that's personal opinion.
In legal terms amending the document is a breach of copyright as:
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
is the first sentence of the GPL v.2 document!
Jason
On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 02:07:42PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
Interesting. Is there any restriction on people calling non-GPL software "GPL"? I mean, is GPL a trademark? Should it be?
GPL isn't a trademark, and can't be (I don't think!) because there are many 'GPL's. The one we all know and love is the GNU GPL, which we usually call the GPL - hence people often call it the GNU Public Licence :(.
It probably ought to be a trademark though, and probably should be called something other than GPL in practice if people are going to start farting around with it. I'm certainly not particularly in favour of people messing with it (I presume with SmoothWall this is a function of the unavailability of free ADSL drivers for Linux, perhaps?)
I wonder what you can enforce with the anti-change clause. I suspect you are not allowed to call it the GNU GPL when you change it, but perhaps it means more than that?
Cheers,
Alex.