adding restrictive terms to LGPL

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

"Wilson, Andrew" <andrew.wilson at intel.com> writes:
> My non-lawyer guess is a judge would read LGPL (either version) as not
> allowing additional restrictive terms -- period.  Also note that a
> restriction to academic use only discriminates by field of use and
> violates the OSD.  Altogether, LGPL+restriction does not look like a
> valid or useful form of open source license.

We are in violent agreement, but I still believe that it could swing
both ways - either the recipients would be allowed to ignore the
additional restriction, or the license would be considered null and
void.  In the latter case, I believe recipients who obtained a copy by
legitimate means (in this case, filling out the form truthfully and
downloading the software) would be granted only those rights set out in
whichever country's copyright laws apply.  In Norway, this means:

  1) the right to use the software for its intended purpose;
  
  2) the right to modify the software to the extent that such
     modifications are necessary in order to use the software for its
     intended purpose (the law specifically mentions fixing bugs);

  3) the right to copy the software to the extent that such copying is
     necessary in order to use the software for its intended purpose (I
     assume this is intended to cover copying the software from disk to
     memory etc.);

  4) the right to make backup copies of the software;

  5) the right to reverse-engineer the software for the purpose of
     understanding how it works;

  6) the right to reverse-engineer the software for the purpose of
     achieving interoperability with other software, and to share the
     information with others, provided that the information is not used
     for the purpose of developing software which is intended as a
     substitute for the software being reverse-engineered.

None of these rights, except the right to modify, may be waived; IIUC,
this means that anti-reverse-engineering clauses in EULAs are
unenforcable in Norway, but it is still not legal to reverse-engineer
Microsoft Word to improve OpenOffice Writer, because Writer is intended
as a substitute for Word.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no