Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 4, 2007 23:12 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right by dtucker
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

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

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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.