[Openicc] GoSoC 2011: opensource and ICC licenses

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "er" == edmund ronald <edmundronald at gmail.com> writes:

er> I think there is some part of the conversation which I have missed
er> here.  Anyone want to forward it, or educate me?  I am not a lawyer

Clauses along the lines of "you can't change it w/o also renaming it"
were determined to be incompatible with the GPL some time ago.

One of the goals of the GPL is to allow those who receive software to
fix it and distribute those fixes.  That goal is not compatible with
"you can't change it w/o also renaming it".

The debian-legal list's archives are probably the best place to read
about it.  The FSF, I think, also has a relevant, archived list.

That incompatibility was an issue for TeX; DEK's license for TeX,
metarfont and the CM fonts included such a clause.

IIRC Don agreed to some slight change to get past that issue.  I suspect
something along the lines of "if you change it w/o renaming it then you
have to acknowledge that you did so" instead of the original language.

So, to be GPL compatible, you have to allow changes w/o requiring
renaming, but you can require that any changes be declared.

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6