Applies to any copyleft licence

Posted Jul 28, 2009 12:25 UTC (Tue) by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
In reply to: Applies to any copyleft licence by epa
Parent article: A new GCC runtime library license snag?

Of course the intend is important. As pointed out above the intent of the system library exception was clarified in GPLv3 and it could be argued that was also what was intended with v2, since that is what Eben himself claimed. If so, the "nit" about how to precisely interpret the wording of "accompanies" in the exception to the exception disappears and all would be fine for everybody.

Applies to any copyleft licence

Posted Jul 28, 2009 20:07 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

Ah, I see. You are right. Although if intent is counted, the intent of the copyright holder of the code (who made the decision to grant a licence to it under GPLv2) may be more important than the intent of the person who wrote the licence.

Applies to any copyleft licence

Posted Jul 28, 2009 20:12 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

One has to assume that the intent of the person who choose the license was to try and understand the intent of the person who wrote it. ;-)

Applies to any copyleft licence

Posted Jul 29, 2009 8:07 UTC (Wed) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, you are right, in the end it is the copyright holder of the GPLv2-only work whose intent counts the most. But do you really believe that if the FSF says "oops, a specific literal reading could cause a problem for free operation systems, and that obviously isn't the intention, so we explicitly say that and make sure that in GPLv3 such textual ambiguity doesn't exist." That there are copyright holders that will say "yes, I specifically choose GPLv2-only to cause a problem for people wanting to read that particular exception language as intending to cause trouble for free operating systems like Debian"?

IMHO, unless a copyright holder explicitly tells you to ignore the stated intent of the license drafter, you can safely ignore that possibility.

Applies to any copyleft licence

Posted Jul 29, 2009 17:54 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the FSF claims that GPLv3 just 'clarifies' or corrects weaknesses in GPLv2, but many other people disagree.