Hello, I'm considering the addition of a third license to Gambit to make some forms of commercial uses simpler. The license is the simplified BSD license:
Copyright (c) 1994-2008, Marc Feeley All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
So Gambit will be triple-licensed, and it is up to the user to choose which license they accept.
Any comments?
Marc
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Hallo,
Marc Feeley wrote:
So Gambit will be triple-licensed, and it is up to the user to choose which license they accept.
I have nothing against the BSD license, but could you please elaborate on the complaints against the Apache license? I guess it is about keeping changes to the Gambit core private?
Cheers, -alex http://www.ventonegro.org/
On 24-Oct-08, at 11:25 AM, Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva wrote:
Hallo,
Marc Feeley wrote:
So Gambit will be triple-licensed, and it is up to the user to choose which license they accept.
I have nothing against the BSD license, but could you pleaseelaborate on the complaints against the Apache license? I guess it is about keeping changes to the Gambit core private?
All I can say is that use case is a small software (applet?) for cell phones which is distributed electronically. One constraint is that the license has to be displayed to the end-user and it is difficult to do on a small screen. So the smaller the better.
Marc
Hallo,
Marc Feeley wrote:
All I can say is that use case is a small software (applet?) for cell phones which is distributed electronically. One constraint is that the license has to be displayed to the end-user and it is difficult to do on a small screen. So the smaller the better.
The MIT license, which is used by Lua[1], is even smaller then. But I guess there is no point in offering the choice of GPL and MIT for the same package.
2008/10/24 Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca:
On 24-Oct-08, at 1:03 PM, Arnaud Bergeron wrote:
If you are really going the BSD way, then you could just drop the other two licenses since BSD is compatible with GPL and Apache2. It may make things simpler.
Do you mean they can coexist ("compatible") or the BSD license subsumes GPL (which I'm quite sure is not the case)?
I mean that if Gambit is licensed only under the BSD (or MIT), then anybody who wants to use it with GPL or Apache code can without a dual or triple licensing scheme.
Marc
Arnaud Bergeron wrote:
2008/10/24 Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca:
On 24-Oct-08, at 1:03 PM, Arnaud Bergeron wrote:
If you are really going the BSD way, then you could just drop the other two licenses since BSD is compatible with GPL and Apache2. It may make things simpler.
Do you mean they can coexist ("compatible") or the BSD license subsumes GPL (which I'm quite sure is not the case)?
I mean that if Gambit is licensed only under the BSD (or MIT), then anybody who wants to use it with GPL or Apache code can without a dual or triple licensing scheme.
I'm not a specialist with licenses. So I'm not sure about further implications except for this:
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.
So practically, that someone will have to release the changes to Gambit which are not full files under the BSD license. Now if someone else is going to take your product (with BSD and (L)GPL parts), and makes modifications, he/she is obliged to republish the modifications to the (L)GPL parts, but not those to the BSD parts. So he/she is allowed to publish sources which won't work (since the republished (L)GPL part may not work anymore with the previously published BSD parts).
Also, another (similar) obervation: if some time in the future some people would like to create a fork of Gambit which would require republishing of changes, i.e. be under the LGPL only, they would be able to do so without issue if Gambit is dual/triple licensed; if Gambit is BSD only, then they would not be able to do this (without contacting each and every contributor to re-publish their code under the LGPL at that point, which is usually impractically difficult or almost impossible (might require rewrites of code of people who are not reachable anymore or refuse to relicense their contributions)).
So I'd say, publishing software also under other licenses than BSD grants a user more rights than only publishing under BSD.
Christian.
Hallo,
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 a procedure and relicense the whole thing GPL.
Cheers, -alex http://www.ventonegro.org/
"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.
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...
Gambit-list mailing list Gambit-list@iro.umontreal.ca https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list
2008/10/24 Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca:
Hello, I'm considering the addition of a third license to Gambit to make some forms of commercial uses simpler. The license is the simplified BSD license:
Copyright (c) 1994-2008, Marc Feeley All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
So Gambit will be triple-licensed, and it is up to the user to choose which license they accept.
Any comments?
If you are really going the BSD way, then you could just drop the other two licenses since BSD is compatible with GPL and Apache2. It may make things simpler.
Marc
Gambit-list mailing list Gambit-list@iro.umontreal.ca https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list
On 24-Oct-08, at 1:03 PM, Arnaud Bergeron wrote:
If you are really going the BSD way, then you could just drop the other two licenses since BSD is compatible with GPL and Apache2. It may make things simpler.
Do you mean they can coexist ("compatible") or the BSD license subsumes GPL (which I'm quite sure is not the case)?
Marc
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Aleksej Saushev -
Alex Queiroz -
Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva
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Arnaud Bergeron -
Christian Jaeger -
Marc Feeley