Clarity and terminology [LWN.net]

Clarity and terminology

Posted Aug 18, 2005 23:09 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Clarity and terminology by oak
Parent article: The Open Software License, Version 3.0

That's a good point about the term "virus." A biological virus doesn't just tempt a cell to make more virus. It enters the cell by force and forces the cell to make more virus. GPL, on the other hand, is strictly quid pro quo.

I think there was some incorrect reference to "GPL-compatible" in this thread. If I have a piece of code A that I'm licensed only under GPL to distribute, and I write some code B and combine them to form program AB, and then I distribute AB, I must license all of the code, including my B code, to the recipients under GPL. Not GPL compatible, but GPL itself.

I can separately distribute just my B code under any license I please.

The GPL-compatible license comes into play if I want to add in code C, which someone else wrote. If I distribute ABC, I must distribute all of it -- A, B, and C -- under GPL. That means that the author of C must license C to me under some kind of license that gives me the power to redistribute it under GPL. Such a license is GPL-compatible.

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Clarity and terminology

Posted Aug 25, 2005 7:22 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

You don't have to SEPARATELY distribute your code B under a different licence at all.

You can distribute your combined work and just say "A is GPL, therefore B must be GPL too. But B is also X-licence, if the recipient wishes to extract it and use it elsewhere".

It's then the recipient's responsibility to make sure he doesn't accidentally include A when he takes B code to use in his product C.

Cheers,
Wol