On 10/12/2012 09:54 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
Note that the penalty for violating the liberty-or-death clause was softer than violation.
You mean, in the sense that it makes clear that you only lose the right of distribution?
As it stands, the way I read it now, it's possible for a company to sign an NDA related to copyleft-next'd software, which immediately causes a violation and if they don't cancel that NDA in 30 days, then their rights terminate per ยง10.1.
How would an NDA trigger liberty-or-death? (I'm not saying it never could, but I'm having trouble understanding your example because it's not obvious how a garden-variety NDA would do so.)
So, in some sense, you've made the liberty-or-death clause more strict.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think so. RMS has said that he added liberty-or-death to GPLv2 to clarify what he felt was already implicity in GPLv1. Indeed, GPLv2 says "This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License."
Liberty-or-death seems to indicate that you can't distribute if that act of distribution would involve you imposing further restrictions on the GPL rights of your distributees. I believe the clarification RMS was making was that the restriction you impose could be the result of some external obligation placed on you.
OTOH, you've made it less strict, because you're clause seems to indict you need direct "Foo vs. 'Not Foo'" contradictions between third-party agreements/judgments and copyleft-next. My feeling is the wording in GPLv3 that says:
If you cannot convey a covered work so as to so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence ...
it seems to me that is much more explicit.
To be convinced there is a problem here I would need to understand your objection better.
- RF