[Gnu-arch-users] Re: GPLv2 or GPLv2+

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Miles Bader writes:

 > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:
 > > [1]  Equally effective would be to divide COPYING into two parts, the
 > > first part being labelled "The Purpose of the GNU GPL", and the second
 > > being labelled "The GNU General Public License", and containing only
 > > the legally enforceable terms.  But this isn't going to happen either.
 > 
 > Why not?  Have you asked?

I've seen the question about separating out the non-license commentary
posed (on the FSB mailing list IIRC) and answered by Richard Stallman.
Richard considers the preamble and other commentary about the
philosophy of the GPL to be an essential part of the license.  I don't
think he would accept a GPL stripped of its advocacy role, even if
aggregated into a COPYING file that also contained an appropriate
polemic.

I mean, really, can you see Richard adopting language like that in
Larry Rosen's Open Software License or a Creative Commons ShareAlike
License for the GPLv4? :-)