Compatibility of the AFL with the GPL

[Richard Stallman]

    Bottom line: I can assure you, as the license author, that the AFL is
    intended to be used for software that can be incorporated into
    GPL-licensed software, and I will almost certainly so advise my clients:

I hope you will decide that you owe it to your clients to inform them
that the FSF rejects your analysis, and that if they do this with
FSF-copyrighted GPL-covered software they may get into a legal dispute
with us.

    There is no possible reason to assume that the GPL states all
    the important rules of behavior in the open source community or
    expresses each licensor's view of what is truly free software.

We designed the GPL to further the goals of the free software
movement, but we never said it states all the important rules of
behavior in the free software community.  That would be a very hard
job which, fortunately, we need not try to do.

What we did aim for is to produce a copyleft license: that is, a
license that doesn't allow additional terms to be added, not even when
the program is extended.  This characteristic, of being a copyleft, is
the reason so many people in our community (including supporters of
the open source movement) use the GPL.

Adding the AFL's license terms would not make the program non-free.
But if people could in general add terms of their choosing, people
could add other terms that would make the software non-free.  We
believe that we have designed the GPL to prohibit this.  By arguing
that we have failed, you are trying to destroy the underpinning of the
majority of free software packages.  Thousands of developers will hope
and pray that judges listen to us and not to you.

We are trying to design, for GPL 3, a way that people can add a
certain selected range of license terms for their own code.  We have
not solved all the problems yet.  We cannot promise that the AFL's
specific requirements will be in this range.  In any case, this is
something for the future.  For now, the GPL is incompatible with
licenses that add requirements that are not in the GPL, independent of
whether they are good requirements or bad requirements.


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