Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 00:56:30 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us (Mason Loring Bliss) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, FreeBSD-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NetBSD/Linux 'distribution' Message-ID: <199902210056.RAA16115@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990220191236.J11361@acheron.middleboro.ma.us> from "Mason Loring Bliss" at Feb 20, 99 07:12:36 pm
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> > You *can't* "GPL it". The GPL specifically states "no other restrictions". > > Of course, FWIW, I believe it's entirely possible for the person who creates > something to offer the use of multiple licenses, where the user is allowed > to choose which license s/he uses. Since only one license would be in use > at any one time, there'd never be a conflict. I'd guess at a need for glue > language to keep folks from stripping the unused license, but whatever... Several products do this; Sleepycat has done it for Berkeley dbm for Linux use (glibc 2.1). The real questions are: 1) Is a metalicense non-strip clause a restriction that conflicts with the GPL? 2) Is code contributed back to a GPL distribution distributable under the non-GPL distributon? What about vice-versa? In general, you can't relicense without a full assignment of rights, which is one of the reasons that code contributed to the FSF or to The Regents or to Perl or to KAFFE all require assignment. I suspect that Sleepycat might be violating some contributor rights with it's relicencing of their BSD licensed code, I just haven't pressed it too hard legally because I like Eric Allman, so his wife can't be that bad a person. For similar reasons, I haven't beat on Eric about the sendmail relicense. Both the dbm and the sendmail code changed license terms. Actually, I'm know that all those OS's that haven't modified the BSD header files for things like TCP/IP are not legally entitled to distribute the code like that (e.g., if SVR4 distributes unmodified BSD header files, then it can't prohibit redistribution by merely affixing their copyright). For FreeBSD, it's clear that a lot of the contributors won't/can't relicense the code. Which won't prevent people from agregating the kernel code with a GPL'ed everything userland and distributing it if they want. They just can't prevent subsequent commercial use of the kernel. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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