[Fedora-legal-list] GPL and additional restrictions

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2011-06-02 at 12:18 -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 11:11:40AM -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> > > (The one glaring exception to
> > > this is the license of Liberation Fonts; consider that license
> > > grandfathered in unless and until we can ever get that license
> > > changed.)
> > 
> > What is more galling to me in that case is that the license falsely
> > refers to 1(b) as an exception, as if to make it seem more benign than
> > it is.  An exception is by definition an additional permission that
> > distributors are allowed to remove (e.g., in order to combine the work
> > with a plain-GPL work).
> 
> This license was negotiated with the supplier company before I arrived
> at Red Hat.  I basically agree with your criticism - the only thing I
> would take issue with is the suggestion of bad intent. The Red Hat
> lawyer involved in negotiating this license had absolutely no
> intention of using the term "exception" in some misleading way. There
> was, I believe, a lack of adequate familiarity with the longstanding
> traditional use of "exception" in GPL licensing culture, with the
> traditional distinction between additional permissions and additional
> restrictions, and with the non-normativeness of tacking on
> noncustomary additional restrictions to the GPL.

I'm glad to hear that no deception was intended.

On a related note, the Licensing:Main entries for GPL versions with
exceptions currently state, "Please be sure that any exceptions are
approved by emailing them to legal at lists.fedoraproject.org first."  But
true exceptions are never problematic, so more to the point would be,
"Please be sure that any terms described as exceptions are really
exceptions by emailing them to legal at lists.fedoraproject.org first."

-- 
Matt