Advice on relicensing from the SFLC [LWN.net]

Advice on relicensing from the SFLC

Posted Sep 8, 2007 7:20 UTC (Sat) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953)
In reply to: Advice on relicensing from the SFLC by JCR
Parent article: Advice on relicensing from the SFLC

The post to your authoritative source of fact (a post you made on a BSD list) deals with a completely different issue than the one posited by the SFLC. The SFLC is saying that when it's BSD licensed and the license is included as a copyright file AND not on the code, AND the code is being incorporated into a GPL project that the licensing terms listed in the BSD copyright file be transfered into the source files (as well as including the copyright file in the subdirectory where the BSD code is) to make sure ownership of different source files is clear.

The gist of what they say is when you put a copyright file in you put the GPL one in the root directory (as the project is assumed to be GPL) to avoid confusion, copy the BSD copyright notices into the BSD code (if they don't exist) and make sure it's totally clear what code is GPL and what code is BSD.

Your post deals with using GPL code in BSD or trying to change the license on code and as far as I can tell has nothing to do with the advice of the SFLC. Did you even read what was written or did you just think that you could willy-nilly switch the GPL and permisive license stuff around and the advice is the same? What this article deals with is clarifying ownership of code, not relicensing anything as you seem to believe. Read the following from the article:

If maintainers have some files that must always remain under more permissive terms, the stewards of the codebase should take great care to obtain explicit assent from each contributor to the file in question. The contributor should indicate agreement that the changes available under the permissive terms, not GPL.

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