[gambit-list] BSD license
Christian Jaeger
christian at pflanze.mine.nu
Sat Oct 25 03:58:09 EDT 2008
Arnaud Bergeron wrote:
> 2008/10/24 Marc Feeley <feeley at 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.
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