inquery about "GPL with commercial exception"

[Ben Finney]

"IOhannes m zmölnig (Debian/GNU)" <umlaeute at debian.org> writes:

> also, they figure that a license "GPL+exceptions" is much easier for
> their audience to *understand* (given that they are already familiar
> with the GPL, they only have to parse and understand the additional
> exceptions) than a new license (even if it is just changing the
> license name, without altering the actual terms).

These further restrictions are not accurately described as “exceptions”,
though. The GPLv2 explicitly uses that term to refer only to additional
*freedoms from* copyright restriction: exceptional further freedoms the
recipient has under the license terms.

Attempting to apply additional *restrictions*, though, results in
incompatibility with the GPLv2, and the result is no valid licese to the
recipient at all.

> - they could dual-license the work under "GPL+exceptions" (to spare
> their happy audience) and under a "Linux Sampler License" (which would
> be the same but under a different name)

The combination, as discussed, is not a valid license the recipient can
coherently make use of under copyright law. So that's basically a
misleading way to effectively grant no license.

If they want to grant a set of license terms more restrictive than the
GNU General Public License, they have no permission from the FSF to use
that name for the license terms.

> that was 1 week ago and i haven't received any further answer. i'm
> under the impression that i will not receive any more answer on this
> topic from their side.

Thank you very much for your efforts to date!

-- 
 \     “Beware of and eschew pompous prolixity.” —Charles A. Beardsley |
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_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney