[Fedora-legal-list] How to note 'GPLv3 with options taken'?

[Richard Fontana]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:45:15 -0400
"Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:

> This is a result of: 
> "If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you
> must place, in the relevant source files, a statement of the
> additional terms that apply to those files, or a notice indicating
> where to find the applicable terms."

Correct. In the case of the traditional
third-party-license-compatibility practice, this is taken care of by
inclusion of the non-GPL license notice in the relevant source file
(which might be the complete license text or a reference to some
license text contained in another file). 

> I always recommend people put the actual terms rather than a notice,
> because "LICENSING" and "README.LICENSE" have a terrible habit of
> getting lost or forgotten, then I have no idea what exceptions you
> meant for this code to have, and I end up trying to find you in
> several years time and forcing you to remember the licensing to code
> you forgot you wrote at all. :)

More generally, I have found from experience that global licensing
notices (though important) should not be used to the exclusion of
licensing notices in individual source files.  (In a paper I
co-authored,
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html
there is a footnote suggesting that top-level notices are preferable to 
'file-by-file' notices; I no longer find this convincing.)

> >From a Fedora perspective, any package that add exceptions to the
> >GPLv3 should be 
> noted in its license tag with:
> 
> License: GPLv3 with exceptions
> 
> or
> 
> License: GPLv3+ with exceptions
> 
> ... depending on whether the license attribution states v3 only or v3
> or later.

Perhaps additional permissions and additional requirements should be
treated differently (or maybe a special tag is needed only if there
are additional requirements?).

- RF