On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 03:01:03PM -0500, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> 
> The three-clause BSD license is universally considered a free software
> license and is certainly acceptable for checking into our repository.
> Moreover, it's GPL-compatible.  The license permits you to take any
> BSD-licensed software that you possess and relicense it as GPL (or
> under any other compatible license, such as "totally proprietary (plus
> liability/attribution requirements for redistributors)").  You
> certainly wouldn't need to rewrite anything.

That's not exactly accurate.  You can't just "relicense" BSD-licensed
code with the GPL, or make it proprietary.  What you *can* do is include
it in something that sorta "wraps" or incorporates the BSD-licensed code,
and license the *whole* using a different license, as long as the
original BSD-licensed code still gets distributed with its BSD license
too.

That doesn't change the fact that you don't need to relicense or rewrite
anything to use BSD-licensed code in this case.


> 
> However, it seems to include a number of trademarked, copyrighted
> logos.  In other words, it's not really BSD-licensed.  I don't know if
> the logos should be in the repo.  Even if we're not going to worry
> about copyright on logos (à la Firefox), I'd think that the current
> extension might be a trademark violation, in that users might
> reasonably think your site is part of or endorsed by Google/AOL/etc.
> IANAL, of course.

This may be a very real concern and, as you point out, should be
considered and/or changed.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
Perrin's Principle of Exclusion: The strength of any system is inversely
proportional to the restrictions on the power of tools allowed to the
general public by that system.

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