[542458]

> IIRC the citation notice was cleared by Stallman as GPL compatible

Do you have a source for this? Im confused by this, as the GPL section 7 is pretty clear that additional restrictions are effectively void. I suppose it’s technically not contrary to the GPL to idly state those restrictions, but it is contrary to the GPL to expect them to do anything. If the author is deliberately including an impotent clause in the hope that people will follow it anyways, I feel that trying to confuse or scare people into doing something the GPL gives them explicit permission to do is contrary to the spirit of the GPL.

Furthermore, trying to retaliate against people who (as permitted by the GPL) remove the citation notice, as the author here has done, seems very contrary to the spirit of the GPL.

[dahart]

Here’s one source, there are several other places Ole has talked about it: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/doc/cita...

I think the confusing issue here is that the notice is not a license requirement, it does not add additional licensing restrictions. It’s an honor-system agreement between the user and Ole, and does not involve the GPL. It does seem to be walking a very fine line, and it’s easy for users to not understand the distinction, but I believe the notice does adhere to the GPL’s rules, even if it doesn’t initially appear to for us non-lawyers.

[542458]

Yes, to me it looks like he’s adding an official license-like note, but then declaring that he’s still GPL compliant because although his note is easily confused with a license it’s not actually a license. He then gets cranky if people remove his not-a-license note or don’t act like it’s a license. Feels very much to me like he’d be better served with something other than the GPL if he doesn’t want people using his software in GPL-permitted ways.