Discussion: ADPL

[Forrest J. Cavalier III]

Chris Gray <chris.gray at acunia.com> wrote:

> Both the trademark and the advertising clauses also make
> the ADPL utterly GPL-incompatible, FWIW.  (This may or
> may not matter to ArsDigita, of course, and is not directly
> relevant to OSD.  Apologies for the noise.)
> 

That is not noise.  Maybe mentioning GPL compatibility
should be standard practice when reviewing a license.
As you said, that may or may not be important, but there
certainly is a lot of software available under the GPL.

The ADPL isn't far from OSD compliance, in my opinion.  GPL
compatibility is harder to achieve:

In addition to the advertising clause, the choice of law
clause and the patent grant (in MPL 1.1) will also make the ADPL
incompatible with the GPL 2.0.  The trademark language might
be GPL compatible with a little tweaking.  

I think the FSF is inconsistent on the point of trademark
protections clauses and GPL compatibility. FSF says at
    http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html
that Open LDAP 2.3 is not GPL-compatible for clauses 4 and 5.

It is hard to find a copy of OpenLDAP 2.3 license online now
without digging in cvsweb, but there is one at 
  http://www.mibsoftware.com/librock/lidesc/openldap2_3.txt

On the other hand, the FSF says that the W3C license is GPL
compatible, and it has a similar trademark clause.  (My reading
of the GPL says that the W3C license should not be compatible.)  

There are two ways that I see trademark clauses written
in licenses.  As I read the GPL, trademark protection clauses
as a condition of license are not GPL compatible.  But
trademark warning statements along the lines of "Nothing in this license
gives you...." don't seem to impose a further restriction,
and therefore are GPL compatible, in my understanding.

Forrest
License Analyzer and Freedom/OSD/GPL compatibility reporter:
   http://www.mibsoftware.com/librock/lidesc/

--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3