Re: Final text of GPL v3 (original) (raw)

Um, no. "You shouldn't have used GPLv3" doesn't have any legal force to resolve the inconsistency. If I license my work under the GPLv3, I as the copyright holder can still modify the terms of my code's license however I damn well want, regardless of what the GPLv3 itself says about whether that is permissible, because the GPLv3 is not binding on me the copyright holder.

If I go to the effort of writing

This program is Free Software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation, with the exception that the prohibition in section 7 of the license on additional restrictions does not apply and the permission in section 13 is not granted.

then I have explicitly addressed the clause in GPLv3 which purports to prohibit additional restrictions. Which statement is going to take precedence? At best I've created a lawyer bomb because my intentions are not clear; at worst I've succeeded in licensing my code in a manner that's incompatible with the GPLv3. But that's exactly the same problem that we had with GPLv2, so what was the point of adding this clause?