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On 21/09/2001 at 09:03 Gervase Markham wrote: >>>Simon, you must be the only person in the world who has studied this >who >>>thinks that way. I can name a whole bundle of dually-licensed projects >>>(OpenOffice, Perl) for which there is a dual license and a single source >>>tree is considered absolutely fine. >> >> No, trust me, I'm not. > > >Can you name a single open source project which is dually licensed where >they considered it a requirement to have two code trees? Any dual licence which includes the GPL requires in conforming to the GPL licence that the GPL licence language only be in the file. That's not to say that people might ignore that, there seems to be a certain cavalier attitude to some of these things, but the GPL requirement is an absolute. > >Simon, we are (as you can probably see) going round in circles. I can >only say that I know of no-one else, and no other project, who has the >same interpretation of dual-licensing as you do. Sun's lawyers (for Open >Office) and Netscape/AOL's lawyers (for Mozilla) both think what we are >doing is legally sound and perfectly reasonable, and will in no way >cause them problems. I'm sorry if you feel differently, and can only ask >(again) that you are kind enough to give your permission for relicensing >code you own copyright to, as you considered you might. > No I never considered anything being re-licenced of mine, I really don't think anything is left that could matter that's all. I'm not being a dog in the manger, anything I did I did in the spirit of, and under the terms of, an agreement everyone understood. I did not contribute believing that files would be relicenced in such a way as to violate the original spirit of the licence. I am _not_ to blame for this. I might also say that there has been no test in a court as to the legitimacy of dual licences. I don't have the references to hand right now, its a long while since I brought all this up originally, but there is an authority that believes combined mutually incompatible licences would cause any judge required to rule to say that neither licence could be considered valid and that the file would be public domain. I realise that's a worthless opinion without an authority, though it did form part of the solicitors' opinions I got in the first place. >(As a side note, if you have been making products for your clients out >of Mozilla code, they are already 'GPL-infected' under your terms, >because NSPR, NSS and JavaScript are all GPL dual-licensed.) I had two approaches to this, one is that I made no changes to any of the 'dual licenced' files and once I became aware of it I ran a script which deleted the GPL alternate licence offer. I still wasn't happy with it though, and one client decided to go the J2EE Swing direction instead specifically because of licencing issues. Simon > >Gerv
