Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wizzwizz4 1807 days ago
Not necessarily. If you do it right, you've got a perfectly GPL-compatible license (because such laundering is, technically, a violation of the GPL… probably) – it's just a license that's more explicit about what's a license violation.

Law isn't code.
2 comments
hnfong 1807 days ago
GPL explicitly forbids re-licensing under more restrictive terms.

So either the added terms are not more restrictive, which basically means they are unnecessary and have no real effect; or they are more restrictive, which is incompatible with the GPL.

You can't have things go both ways. It seems that your argument is "we're not adding restrictions, we're just saying what we think Copyright law / the GPL should actually be like." But unfortunately you can't "clarify" Copyright Law or "clarify" the GPL by adding terms. Ultimately courts decide that.

(Of course, if somehow your "clarification" happens to align with a court decision, then maybe it will work after all. But in theory your "clarification" is still not necessary and has no additional effect....)

link
wizzwizz4 1806 days ago
> But in theory your "clarification" is still not necessary and has no additional effect....

Except your clarification will be interpreted by a court of law. “This license is compatible with the GPL and I can interpret the GPL in a way that lets me do something this license says I can't” is much less likely to stand than “well maybe the author thought the GPL said this, but it actually says my interpretation”.

This, of course, presumes that such a license is actually compatible with the GPL, something I'm getting less and less certain of over time. (What constitutes a compiled form? If a predictive model doesn't count – which it might not, since it outputs source code, very much unlike how compiled programs normally work – then my argument falls down. And many other things would also knock the argument down; I'm not confident enough that all my assumptions are right, or that they should be right.)

link
heavyset_go 1807 days ago
GPL code and its derivatives can't be distributed with additional restrictions.
link