The SFLC has just finished their white paper on including BSD/ISC/MIT code in GPL'd projects. The full version can be found here:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl- collaboration.html The main points are: - Incorporating permissive code in a GPL'd project is fine, as long as you don't remove the license. - Adding GPL'd code to a permissive-licensed file is possible, if you follow the correct form for placing the licenses (GPL then 'This file incorporates work covered by...'). - Dual licensing is a bad idea; unless you are a lawyer you will get it wrong and have some unintended consequences. If you are a lawyer, you only probably will. - Make sure you keep track of contributors to your project. The first three of these are pretty much what I said already. The third is close to something Jesse raised. Relicensing code is tricky even when you can contact the original author. If you can't, then you typically have to wait 75 years, which is a bit tricky. One possible solution is that contributors agree that, in the event that they can't be contacted by some pre-arranged mechanism (e.g. mailing list, posting in a certain newspaper, whatever) for a year then the project gains the right to relicense any code they have contributed. I'm not entirely sure I'd be happy with this though (doing it myself, or expecting others to do it). David _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
