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Relevant text from FSF's "Opinion on Additional Terms" from circa 2006-07-27

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I (Bradley M. Kuhn) carefully went through FSF's "Opinion on Additional
Terms", which appears to have been published on Wednesday 2 August 2006 (a
few days after the second GPLv2 discussion published on Thursday 27 July
2006), and merged in any relevant text and descriptions that might be of use
in this tutorial.

The raw material used for this commit can be found here:
    http://gplv3.fsf.org/opinions-draft-2.html
Specifically, a copy of the LaTeX sources are here:
    http://gplv3.fsf.org/additional-terms-dd2.tex

As I merged in this text, I added FIXME's where it seemed the text was
incomplete or referred to parts of GPLv3 draft text that disappeared in later
versions.

Finally, note that this material was originally copyrighted and licensed as
follows:

  Copyright © 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

  Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted
  worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice, and the
  copyright notice, are preserved.

However, I am hereby relicensing this material to CC-By-SA-4.0, with the
verbal permission from John Sullivan, Executive Director of the FSF, which
was given to me during a conference call on Wednesday 12 February 2014.
This commit is contained in:
Free Software Foundation, Inc 2006-08-02 16:27:39 -04:00 committed by Bradley M. Kuhn
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121
gpl-lgpl.tex
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@ -2548,8 +2548,110 @@ contains provisions that are designed to reduce license incompatibility by
making it easier for developers to combine code carrying non-GPL terms with
GPL'd code.
% FIXME: connecting text
\subsection{Additional Permissions}
The GPL is a statement of permissions, some of which have conditions.
Additional terms, terms that supplement those of the GPL, may come to be
placed on, or removed from, GPL-covered code in certain common ways. We
consider those added terms ``additional permissions'' if they grant
exceptions from the conditions of the GPL, and ``additional requirements'' if
they add conditions to the basic permissions of the GPL. The treatment of
additional permissions and additional requirements under GPLv3 is necessarily
asymmetrical, because they do not raise the same ethical and interpretive
issues; in particular, additional requirements, if allowed without careful
limitation, could transform a GPL'd program into a non-free one. With these
principles in the background, section 7 answers the following questions: (1)
How do the presence of additional terms on all or part of a GPL'd program
affect users' rights? (2) When and how may a licensee add terms to code being
distributed under the GPL? (3) When may a licensee remove additional terms?
% FIXME: FSF third person, etc.
Additional permissions present the easier case. We have licensed some of our
own software under GPLv2 with permissive exceptions that allow combination
with non-free code, and that allow removal of those permissions by downstream
recipients; similarly, LGPLv2.1 is in essence a permissive variant of GPLv2,
and it permits relicensing under the GPL. We have generalized these
practices in section 7. A licensee may remove any additional permission from
a covered work, whether it was placed by the original author or by an
upstream distributor. A licensee may also add any kind of additional
permission to any part of a work for which the licensee has, or can give,
appropriate copyright permission. For example, if the licensee has written
that part, the licensee is the copyright holder for that part and can
therefore give additional permissions that are applicable to it.
Alternatively, the part may have been written by someone else and licensed,
with the additional permissions, to that licensee. Any additional
permissions on that part are, in turn, removable by downstream recipients.
As subsection 7a explains, the effect of an additional permission depends on
whether the permission applies to the whole work or a part.
% FIXME: rework this a bit
We have drafted version 3 of the GNU LGPL, which we have released with Draft
2 of GPLv3, as a simple list of additional permissions supplementing the
terms of GPLv3. Section 7 has thus provided the basis for recasting a
formally complex license as an elegant set of added terms, without changing
any of the fundamental features of the existing LGPL. We offer this draft of
LGPLv3 as as a model for developers wishing to license their works under the
GPL with permissive exceptions. The removability of additional permissions
under section 7 does not alter any existing behavior of the LGPL; the LGPL
has always allowed relicensing under the ordinary GPL.
\subsection{Additional Requirements and License Compatibility}
% FIXME: minor rewrites needed
We broadened the title of section 7 because license compatibility, as it is
conventionally understood, is only one of several facets of the placement of
additional terms on GPL'd code. The license compatibility issue arises for
three reasons. First, the GPL is a strong copyleft license, requiring
modified versions to be distributed under the GPL. Second, the GPL states
that no further restrictions may be placed on the rights of recipients.
Third, all other free software licenses in common use contain certain
requirements, many of which are not conditions made by the GPL. Thus, when
GPL'd code is modified by combination with code covered by another formal
license that specifies other requirements, and that modified code is then
distributed to others, the freedom of recipients may be burdened by
additional requirements in violation of the GPL. It can be seen that
additional permissions in other licenses do not raise any problems of license
compatibility.
% FIXME: minor rewrites needed
Section 7 relaxes the prohibition on further restrictions slightly by
enumerating, in subsection 7b, a limited list of categories of additional
requirements that may be placed on code without violating GPLv3. The list
includes the items that were listed in Draft 1, though rewritten for clarity.
It also includes a new catchall category for terms that might not obviously
fall within one of the other categories but which are precisely equivalent to
GPLv3 conditions, or which deny permission for activities clearly not
permitted by GPLv3. We have carefully considered but rejected proposals to
expand this list further. We have also rejected suggestions, made by some
discussion committee members, that the Affero clause requirement (7d in Draft
1 and 7b4 in Draft 2) be removed, though we have revised it in response to
certain comments. We are unwavering in our view that the Affero requirement
is a legitimate one, and we are committed to achieving compatibility of the
Affero GPL with GPLv3.
% FIXME: minor rewrites needed
A GPL licensee may place an additional requirement on code for which the
licensee has or can give appropriate copyright permission, but only if that
requirement falls within the list given in subsection 7b. Placement of any
other kind of additional requirement continues to be a violation of the
license. Additional requirements that are in the 7b list may not be removed,
but if a user receives GPL'd code that purports to include an additional
requirement not in the 7b list, the user may remove that requirement. Here
we were particularly concerned to address the problem of program authors who
purport to license their works in a misleading and possibly
self-contradictory fashion, using the GPL together with unacceptable added
restrictions that would make those works non-free software.
\section{GPLv3~\S7: Explicit Compatibility}
% FIXME: probably mostly still right, needs some updates, though.
In GPLv3 we take a new approach to the issue of combining GPL'd code with
@ -2616,6 +2718,25 @@ non-GPL terms covering the added parts just as they must preserve the GPL, as
long as any substantial portion of those parts is present in the user's
version.
% FIXME: minor rewrites needed
Section 7 points out that GPLv3 itself makes no assertion that an additional
requirement is enforceable by the copyright holder. However, section 7 makes
clear that enforcement of such requirements is expected to be by the
termination procedure given in section 8 of GPLv3.
% FIXME: better context, etc.
Some have questioned whether section 7 is needed, and some have suggested
that it creates complexity that did not previously exist. We point out to
those readers that there is already GPLv2-licensed code that carries
additional terms. One of the objectives of section 7 is to rationalize
existing practices of program authors and modifiers by setting clear
guidelines regarding the removal and addition of such terms. With its
carefully limited list of allowed additional requirements, section 7
accomplishes additional objectives, permitting the expansion of the base of
code available for GPL developers, while also encouraging useful
experimentation with requirements we do not include in the GPL itself.
\section{GPLv3~\S8: A Lighter Termination}