Originally posted by bridgman
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This is another of those "debated areas" as far as I know. Section 8 of GPLv2 explicitly talks about geographical restrictions, and section 7 (IIRC) talks about complying with other regs & requirements. IIRC it's the view that "adding these restrictions to the license doesn't actually help" which has broader support, not "these restrictions are incompatible with <license>".
The FSF does argue strongly against them in the "free sw" introduction, but GPLv2 and others do include some explicit support for them.
I don't know the correct answer, just that if you ask three people you're definitely getting more than one answer (and there are only two possible
).
If you're asking why the initial release of code had this license, it's just because we could release a lot earlier with this license than with something else. Getting agreement that something less is safe and applicable takes longer, and we wanted the code out in public repos so other developers could work with it.
If you're asking "why does AMD have to follow US law" it's that "being headquartered in the US" thing AFAIK.
The FSF does argue strongly against them in the "free sw" introduction, but GPLv2 and others do include some explicit support for them.
I don't know the correct answer, just that if you ask three people you're definitely getting more than one answer (and there are only two possible
).If you're asking why the initial release of code had this license, it's just because we could release a lot earlier with this license than with something else. Getting agreement that something less is safe and applicable takes longer, and we wanted the code out in public repos so other developers could work with it.
If you're asking "why does AMD have to follow US law" it's that "being headquartered in the US" thing AFAIK.
I want to give a copy of the code to help a friend who lives in a country the US government forbids me from helping.
Normally I'd work around this problem by giving a copy to someone in Canada who offers it to someone in the country that US law forbids me from helping.
I haven't don't anything wrong. The law might be unjust, but I can't be expected to change the law of the United States and what I did was maybe the only way I could help someone without running afoul of the US law and possibly being convicted under it if I had helped that person directly.
Enter this problem of US export restrictions being put into the license. Now if I give a copy to someone in Canada, he's violating AMD's copyrights if he turns around to give a copy to someone in a country the US government doesn't like, even though the export restrictions themselves might not be the law in Canada.
So AMD's license is just like the BSD license, except that it's not and it unilaterally strips the rights of tens of millions of people to use the code, based on a list of who the US federal government doesn't like.
You've gone WAY past the legal requirements of AMD, which is to not directly give a copy of the code to a prohibited person. Most companies don't misuse copyright like AMD has done. Most companies would have simply put something on THEIR download page that said people in one of those countries couldn't download it FROM THEM DIRECTLY.
It's sad that you'll probably get your non-free/non-open code into LLVM and cause an unnecessary legal encumbrance with it. I hope they reject it and tell you to fix your restrictive license.
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