On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 3:32 PM, Richard Fontana <rfont...@redhat.com> wrote:
> There was one notorious case of the use of GPLv2 with a permissive and > restrictive additional term that was described at the time as an > "exception" -- Red Hat's license for Liberation Fonts 1.0. See: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts#Distribution > > I wouldn't particularly recommend use of a 'WITH' expression to describe > Liberation Fonts 1.0, but might not be the only example of a use of > "exception" by a licensor (and the general public too) in this sense in the > real world. IOW, there could be multiple cases in the real world of things > called "exceptions" that are not "additional permissions". > > Richard > That's a similar concern I raised on the call last week - though at the time I admittedly lacked a real world example as you have provided here. I was considering mentioning the "FreeRTOS GPL exception" ( http://www.freertos.org/license.txt) which I discovered recently. (I do not endorse what they created as an "exception", in fact they also refer to it as a "modification to the GPL", - I'm just citing its existence.) Regardless of the example, the phrase I keep coming back to for describing exceptions is "modifier of something". I think of these as modifiers that only exist when applied to a license. Admittedly some licenses (though not all), prevent explicit "modification" of the license, but they all modify terms of what you can or cannot do or the conditions that apply. The language I've used below may need cleanup, but the high level construct I was thinking about was similar to the following statement. Plain text is not easy for redlining, so I've used [ADD: ] and [REMOVE: ] in brackets to show additions and deletions from the original proposal Jilayne and Bradley took the initiative to draft (thank you). The SPDX License List includes a list of commonly found exceptions to open source licenses. Exceptions [ADD: may exempt, modify or add terms, permissions or conditions] [REMOVE: grant additional permissions] beyond those [REMOVE: already given] in the license that the exception modifies. These exceptions are not stand-alone licenses; rather, they are designed for use with the License Expression Syntax operator, "WITH", to identify a license that includes an [REMOVE: additional permission] [ADD: Exception] [REMOVE: beyond those in the main license]. A "clean version" would read as: The SPDX License List includes a list of commonly found exceptions to open source licenses. Exceptions may exempt, modify or add terms, permissions or conditions beyond those in the license that the exception modifies. These exceptions are not stand-alone licenses; rather, they are designed for use with the License Expression Syntax operator, "WITH", to identify a license that includes an exception. -- Mike
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