On 01/18/2017 04:20 AM, Henrik Ingo wrote: > The only annoying part when mixing two of them together is that you > must still correctly retain the license for each piece of code. So the > source code file that was originally BSD licensed must retain the BSD > license in its header, and likewise for the file that is MIT license. > You must just be careful not to mix them.
Fortunately, "retaining the license for each piece of code" does not imply segregating the licensed code on a file level (or any other specific technical level). The authors did not license "files". Their licenses say nothing about "headers". The authors licensed their code. Where you place that licensed code is up to you, and you may mix "code pieces" as needed. When dealing with a project containing a complex mixture of simple, compatible licenses like BSD and MIT, the easiest thing to do is to acknowledge their existence in one place (e.g., NOTICE or COPYING file), under a general "this Software contains code licensed under the following licenses:" header. This will satisfy BSD and MIT license requirements. Many open source projects do that because tracking individual license X or author Y "code pieces" for licensing purposes quickly becomes impractical, has no value for a typical open source project, and may actually harm development. I can only imagine one scenario where a centralized disclaimer does not work well for simple licenses like MIT and BSD: If the projects finds significant value in eventually removing all code licensed under license X or by author Y. Such situations are rare exceptions for genuine open source projects. HTH, Alex. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org https://lists.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
