On 08/06/2012 08:07 PM, Tom Marble wrote:
AFAICT the incompatibility rises from the EPL choice of venue [2] which makes EPL not GPL compatible.
Choice of law, actually. But as Luis Villa explained there are other problems.
For the most part I would say I don't agree with the FSF on the notion that presence of a choice of law clause gives rise to GPL incompatibility. The FSF has never, to my knowledge, provided an explanation of why this is so *in general* (I understand how it might be so in a specific case, such as the "Unfreedonia" hypothetical Eben Moglen has mentioned). But usually where one is assessing GPL compatibility of another license that has a choice-of-law clause, there are one or more other clauses that separately give rise to concerns about GPL compatibility, as is true of the EPL and its ancestors.
Discussion Draft 2 of GPLv3 (June 2006) actually stated explicitly that "choice of law, forum and venue" clauses (among some other kinds of provisions or conditions) were to be treated as incompatible, but this was removed from GPLv3 Discussion Draft 3 (March 2007), with this explanation in the accompanying rationale document:
"The list in the final paragraph of 7b accurately presented our historical view regarding each such requirement. With at least some of the items in the list, however, there may be particular circumstances in which categorical exclusion will lead to an incorrect result. We think it is better, then, to leave this list out of the license text."
- RF