Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 4, 2007 22:05 UTC (Tue) by dtucker (subscriber, #6575)
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Interestingly, in the preamble, the GPLv2 says:

"For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have."

however when someone relicenses a BSD (or ISC) licensed work this isn't the case. They had some rights that the recipients of the relicensed work doesn't.

Disclosure: I'm one of the "BSD folk".

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Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 4, 2007 23:12 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

First off, this is from the preamble of the GPL, not from the actual "terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification", so it has very little (if any) legal meaning.

As for "however when someone relicenses a BSD (or ISC) licensed work this isn't the case" - that's simple - the work was licensed under BSC (or ISC) licence in the first place, which doesn't have the above "demand", not even in the preamble, so why would anyone have to follow it? GPL's "demands" cannot apply "backwards".

The reason for being able to distribute BSD licensed code under the GPL, is the fact that all three requirements from the BSD licence are met by shipping under the GPL too. Contrary to this, the advertising requirement from the original BSD licence cannot be met, so that licence is incompatible with the GPL.

You may also check these links out:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIsCompatible
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#OrigBSD

Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 12:33 UTC (Wed) by dtucker (subscriber, #6575) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, I'm making no claims about legality (or otherwise). I'm just pointing out that in this particular case (specifically, distribution of a GPL-only derivative of a BSD licensed work), the net effect seems to contradict one of the stated goals of the GPL: someone doing this has some rights that they do not pass to the recipient of the derived work.

Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 22:14 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Yeah, nice try, but not quite :-)

The goal of the GPL (any version) is to preserve software freedoms, as defined here:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

I'm not going to go into "which is better" here, but it is clear to anyone that by licensing under a permissive licence, some of the freedoms can vanish in due course of (binary-only) redistribution. In other words, they are not guaranteed to be preserved using such a licence. Hence the GPL.

Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 13:38 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

If the same text was present in the BSD version before the relicensing is done, you'd have a point. But the text was added afterwards, in your hypothetical example.

This because the meaning of "all the rights that you have" depends on the license. So GPL people in general think that the rights given by GPL should be passed along, but that doesn't automatically mean that they agree that any rights you have should be passed along, no matter what those are.

But the BSD license doesn't allow relicensing anyway:

"Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer."

So your example is moot, it can't happen.

The current mess is because someone did it anyway, which was rectified, and because everything is muddled up with another case where there was a dual license and the BSD part was dropped.

More blahblah about dual license stuff below:

Now there is another thing that makes it more complex, and that is that a work/program is the whole thing, and not a small part of it. Throw in that an author always has more rights than recipients, and it becomes murkier. If not making a special case for the original author everyone following that preamble should put his work in the public domain.

So assuming that the original author has some leeway, that we're dealing with a dual licensed work, and modifications are done and redistributed under only one of the two licenses, then no rights are withhold. Sure, the work isn't distributed by the other license, but the modifications, which are new, may not be distributed under that other license, and thus the license of the two which was chosen is the only valid one for the whole work/program.

Adding a dual license for the unmodified parts doesn't make much sense because people can better get that from the original source.