2008/10/26 Aleksej Saushev asau@inbox.ru:
"Alex Queiroz" asandroq@gmail.com writes:
On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 4:58 AM, Christian Jaeger christian@pflanze.mine.nu wrote:
Suppose someone wants to publish his own code based on Gambit (L)GPL so that changes to his/her code will have to be republished. Assume Gambit itself is only BSD licensed; the combination will contain parts under both licenses. Assume to make his own code work, he also had to change Gambit in a number of places; would those changes be LGPL or BSD licensed? (You can't choose LGPL for the whole Gambit files anymore, because the original Gambit code is only licensed under BSD.) Maybe you could switch license within the file, i.e. add another license header in the midst of the file stating (L)GPL before the new function, but at some point this will get impractical, which is why usually such contributions are just made under the same license as the existing file, right? The only practical solution might be to offer the changes only as a patch file, and put the patch under the (L)GPL, but that plays poorly with VCS systems etc.
If Gambit were BSD or MIT licensed, I could change just aprocedure and relicense the whole thing GPL.
No, you can't. You have to own the copyright for that.
Yes you can.
The thing is that you don't really relicense, but rather add your modifications under the GPL. Because of the way the GPL works, the whole thing is now under a GPL license. Although, if somebody only took some files you haven't changed, then that subset would still be BSD.
Also, if you do significant changes to a file then you could add your own copyright statement and claim that the file is now under the GPL.
But in all cases, you would have the obligation to leave the original license in place, since you can't remove it unless you get permission from the copyright holders.
The only situation where this does make a difference is when someone would try to fork (or build something on) the project and get everything under a GPL license. This would be more troublesome since he or she would have to significantly change every file in the distribution.
So it boils down to this: If the intent is to let the user choose under which license to use the code then triple-licencing is the way to go. If the intent is just to let people use the code, whatever their licence choice is for their own code, BSD-only will achieve that.
-- HE CE3OH...
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