Le 15/11/2012 10:35, Pekka Jääskeläinen a écrit :
> Ah, sorry, this particular case was not a dual license but GPL+exception:
[...]
> Thus, if we include these macros in the pocl sources, pocl gets force-
> licensed to GPL?
No: these macros sources will be GPL+exception (as all 'standard'
autoconf macros) but all other files wont change their license.
A project can be build from lots of files that are under different
license. To be convinced, on a Debian or Ubuntu system, look at
/usr/share/doc/*/copyright: you will see lots of softwares whose
sources files are not under the same license. For example, on
my system (Debian unstable), /usr/share/doc/libc6/copyright lists:
[...]
* Most of the GNU C library is under the following copyright:
[...LGPL...]
* The utilities associated with GNU C library is under the following
copyright:
[...GPL...]
* All code incorporated from 4.4 BSD is distributed under the following
license:
[...BSD...]
* The DNS resolver code, taken from BIND 4.9.5, is copyrighted both by
UC Berkeley and by Digital Equipment Corporation. The DEC portions
are under the following license:
[...other license...]
* The Sun RPC support (from rpcsrc-4.0) is covered by the following
license:
[... kind of BSD license...]
* The following CMU license covers some of the support code for Mach,
derived from Mach 3.0:
[...yet another license...]
* The file if_ppp.h is under the following CMU license:
[...CMU license...]
[...and so on....]
So, there is no problem to distribute together sources files with
different licenses.
Now, for the resulting binary to be redistributable (or even to be
legally runnable), one must ensure that all the licenses of the
sources involved in the building of the binary are compatible.
And this is what decide the license of the resulting binary.
In pocl case, the license of the macros source file I added will
allow the resulting binary to be distributed with the same
license as before. The exception added to the GPL allows this. If it
were not the case, pocl (and lots of other BSD/MIT programs) would be
illegal (more exactly would be forced to have their binary
distributed under the GPL) due to the use of standard autoconf macros
that are under the same license (GPL+Exception).
The only change is that you cannot say anymore that all sources
files are MIT, you need to say that all sources but the m4 file
are MIT, the m4 file beeing GPL+exception.
[Edit: I just see that some files of pocl are already under another
license, as stated in COPYING and tools/llvm-ld/LICENSE.TXT]
> However, after we generate the build scripts to the .tar.gz
> and do not include the macro source, the license can be again MIT. Just need
> to remove those files at that point.
No need to remove any sources: sources can have different licenses.
> Also, I'm not sure if the GPL is transferred from build scripts to sources so
> it might be that we need to license only the autotools build scripts with GPL
> at the worst case.
As said before, if you think there is a problem with these macros,
you have the same problem with all standard autoconf macro...
Regards,
Vincent
> On 11/15/2012 11:28 AM, Pekka Jääskeläinen wrote:
>> On 11/15/2012 11:24 AM, Kalle Raiskila wrote:
>>> Pocl was started as a MIT-only project, and I jumped in mid-stream, so
>>> it is not for me to go and change policies. Is there a legal reason why
>>> MIT-only is chosen? (And why e.g. Free Beer is frowned upon ;)) I
>>
>> It doesn't help to license pocl with a dual GPL/MIT license if one
>> wants to use GPL-only code as a part of pocl. Due to GPL "copyleft",
>> pocl would then need to be force-licensed to GPL due to the need to use
>> GPL-parts, as GPL is not MIT-compatible. MIT/BSD is more free than
>> GPL, that's why it was chosen for pocl.
>>
>> The other way around is OK: if the library pocl uses is GPL/BSD/MIT
>> dual-licensed we just use the MIT/BSD license instead of GPL when using
>> the lib in pocl, no need to change the pocl license.
>>
>
>
--
Vincent Danjean Adresse: Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble
Téléphone: +33 4 76 61 20 11 ENSIMAG - antenne de Montbonnot
Fax: +33 4 76 61 20 99 ZIRST 51, avenue Jean Kuntzmann
Email: [email protected] 38330 Montbonnot Saint Martin
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