[XviD-devel] Re: License/legal discussions

Christoph Lampert chl at math.uni-bonn.de
Sat Dec 20 17:25:10 CET 2003


On Sat, 20 Dec 2003, Jan Rychter wrote:
> Thank you, Christoph -- this is a *very* good summary of what we're
> discussing. I couldn't have phrased it better.

Thank you ;-)

>From my discussion, also at gnu.misc.discuss, it seems that the easiest
and most-in-the-spirit-of-GPL solution is to modify XviD's license to what
we originally had intended: modification and distribution should be
allowed under GPL, except that when we said "GPL", we didn't think of the
"no patents clause". 
We could therefore modify XviD's license to be "GPL, with exception
of the patent restriction which is replaced by somethink like
"Usage and/or distribution may need a license, which every user and
distributor has to care about him- or herself." 

Would you, Jan (and you lawyers), think that this is sufficient? I didn't
find any precedent on this, it seems that nobody seems to be aware of the
stuff. 
I know however, that e.g. libstdc++ has a modified GPL as licence to get
rid of some limitations in LGPL, so it might not be impossible to just
combine GPL with other stuff as it's needed. 


> Also, please try to keep money out of the discussion -- it also has
> nothing to do with this.

I agree! GPL is not a noncommercial-only license, it's a
free-software-only license. 

gruel




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