[XviD-devel] License. GPL or restricted?

[Jan Lucas]

Andreas Metzler wrote:
> Freshmeat.net says xvid is GPL, however ./src/image/reduced.c says:
> 
>  *  Under section 8 of the GNU General Public License, the copyright
>  *  holders of XVID explicitly forbid distribution in the following
>  *  countries:
>  *
>  *    - Japan
>  *    - United States of America
> 
> Is this just a forgotten notice, or does it apply? I wonder, because
> this notice is rather old (2002) and there are more recent
> contributions by Pascal Massimino licensed under vanilla GPL without
> the additional restriction.

Section 8 of the GPL says:

  8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in
certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the
original copyright holder who places the Program under this License
may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding
those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among
countries not thus excluded.  In such case, this License incorporates
the limitation as if written in the body of this License.

So freshmeat and reduced.c both could be right, as such a limitation is
explicitly possible under the GPL without any modification to the main
license.

				Jan