"Simon P. Lucy" wrote: > > 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.
Please point to the language in the GPL that specifies this. I've read the GPL a number of times, and my understanding was that this was NOT in the "normative" part of the license, but only a recommendation. If I remember correctly, it even says so explicitly. > 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. Since you don't believe there is anything of yours left in the tree, there wouldn't be any harm in making a blanket statement of the form "if there are any fragments of my code remaining in the Mozilla tree, they can be relicensed in this way", right? Or do you think there's a risk to you from GPL'ing even a tiny fragment of code that you weren't even aware existed? Alternatively, how about just saying that any such fragments are in the public domain? This would allow mozilla.org to license them in any way they see fit, without you having to ever license anything under the GPL. > I might also say that there has been no test in a court as to the > legitimacy of dual licences. Nor of the GPL itself. However, a lot of highly paid lawyers consider it valid, and the same applies to dual-licensing. > 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. I don't understand. There is ONE license, and it reads like this: You may use this code either under this set of terms, or this set of terms, or this set of terms. Thus this license isn't inconsistent in any way: even if the individual sets of terms conflict with each other, the actual license is not inconsistent because it doesn't require ALL of them to be in force, just any individual one of them at the choice of the licensee. Could you please try to explain (I know you have before, but I've never been able to see it, and judging from the conversations here nobody else has either) exactly what the "inconsistency" is? Stuart.
