On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Chad Perrin <per...@apotheon.com> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 03:38:04AM -0800, Chris Travers wrote: >> >> Thus in general I think one is generally better off talking with >> upstream projects and trying to get them on board. > > Take the most restrictive reasonable interpretation of both if you want > to play it safe. After all, a change in the upstream project's > maintainership could get you in a lot of trouble if you rely entirely on > the legally non-binding word of a project maintainer.
I think one could easily read the GPL v3 and the 2-clause BSD licenses (and hence every other similar permissive license) as requiring incompatible things. If we want to take the most restrictive reasonable interpretation of both, these licenses are incompatible, which is somebody nobody really believes. The issue comes down to this: The general view among BSD-license-using developers is that you cannot change the license of a BSD-licensed work as such without changing it (and then you are creating a new work and effectively licensing your own work under terms you choose provided that required notices are intact). In other words, the predominant view of the BSD license among developers who license their works in that license is that the license to the code does not restrict your own ability to license your own code which may use this code however you wish, but the license cannot be changed on the code itself. This view is also expressed in the SFLC's discussion of mixing permissive licensed files with GPL'd files and advises *against* changing the license without adding code which is at least potentially copyright-worthy. This view is clearly reasonable. The view of RMS and Eben Moglen (at least last time I discussed this with Moglen, albeit a couple years ago) was that the GPL v3 *requires* the ability to change the license without actually adding code (section 7, paragraph 2), but that such terms can't effectively enforced without changing the work. In other words, GPL v3 according to them requires that the license be convertable to the GPL v3 without adding new code. Many people feel this view is reasonable including many on this list. In other words, the BSD license cannot be assumed to be reducible to the GPL v3 + additional permissions as defined in section 7 of that license. For the licenses to be compatible, the GPL v3 must be read with the assumption that they are compatible (this is one area every lawyer I have talked with on this matter agrees with), and so you have the question as far as whether the 7(b) additional restrictions to preserve legal notices are a sufficiently broad area to essentially provide additional permissions which cannot be removed by someone who merely distributes the source of the software. If it is, then these licenses are clearly compatible. If not..... In other words if you take the most restrictive reasonable interpretation of each license, then we can't have GPL v3 software using standard PostgreSQL client libraries for example (because you can't just relicense these libraries as under the GPL without adding copyright-worthy changes). I want to see anyone who really agrees with this. The fundamental problem here is something that lawyers try to eliminate but fundamentally cannot: human language is fundamentally subject to ambiguity and for every text there are a significant number of potential interpretations of it. Best Wishes, Chris Travers _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss