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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 09:38 PM EDT |
Personally, I feel like releasing some of my own code
under the GPL
but it will be marked 'Not for use in the USA'.
If that
marking is part of the license or imposed as a
requirement for use, it can't be
GPLed.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 12:50 AM EDT |
Yeah you would not be able to put that restriction on the GPL'd code. You would
have to make a whole new license agreement stating your desired terms...
Note that licensing under the GPL stops YOU and anyone else down the chain
limiting access to the software. It does not cover any legal obligations or
restrictions that an uninvolved 3rd party may bring to the mix. you could argue
that it would only Be liable for patent infringement if it was downloaded and
used in the USA. So whoever downloads it there is liable and the distributor
(or distributors up the chain) is maybe liable for inducement. So you may be
able to limit your liability with a highly visible disclaimer that states that
you do not intend this software to be used inside the USA due to patent concerns
and that while you can't limit them from doing so because of the GPL license you
strongly advise against it. You could even add this disclaimer to display every
time the program runs... Good way to point out how stupid software patents are
;)
But as you can see it's not a known safe solution so GPL may not be the way to
go. Another option is to pick one of the many other Open source licenses like
BSD/Apache etc which may not have the same limit on limitations. Then you are
free to add your own custom restrictions as you see fit.
It would also be nice to know what the copyright holders of the GPL license
itself feel about others using there wording as part of a new license. It's
interesting that you can add somethings to a GPL license like classpath
exception. But I think this may be because Classpath exception does not add any
limits to the GPL and it just grants extra use rights.
Also note that modifying the GPL in any way like this would make it NOT the GPL
and therefor not compatible. This means you can't use this code in another GPL
project or use GPL code in yours.
Michael[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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