Quoting Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...>:
I've thought maybe this could be stripped down to essentially (but politely) say, "This software can be redistributed freely under the terms of the GPL". Anyway, take a look and let me know what you think.
I wouldn't attempt modifying the boilerplate agreement without enlisting a (German) lawyer to review it, at minimum[1].
What I would recommend is sending them a copy of the GPL, with introductory text explaining that it is the only license we offer, but that it appears to be more than sufficiently liberal for their purposes (no royalties, and no time or regional limits). Direct them to the section "TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION"[2].
Note to them that while there _is_ a requirement to make Inkscape's source code available, that requirement can be satisfied by simply including a copy of the source code on the CD (per T&C sec. 3a), which we can provide to them along with the installer/binaries[3].
It might not hurt to point out that the license is generic to several different products, but is applied to Inkscape in particular per section 0 of the terms and conditions.
-mental
[1] Even if you successfully adjusted the conditions on distribution without unintended problems due to wording issues, you obviously can't, for example, warrant that you (Bryce Harrington) are the original author, nor is there an organization legally representing all the copyright holders that you could sign on behalf of.
And that's just to my untrained eye. There are potentially more sutble gotchas due to differences in German versus US law (they come from very different legal traditions, so some basic assumptions you may take for granted are wrong).
[2] The preamble and the later suggestions for attribution may be confusing for them, but obviously we have to present the whole license document textually intact, per its own license.
[3] Yes, I know they could download it from our web site, but I suspect they would be more comfortable if we gave them everything they needed directly. They are going to have some culture shock issues here as they're coming from the proprietary world, so we may as well accomodate them where we can.