Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 5:58 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312)
In reply to: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right by ncm
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

"It is simply not true that the BSD license text in a dual-licensed work 'must be preserved of course'."

Actually, I think it depends on the way the language combining the two licenses is written. It could be explicitly written to allow authors of derived works to drop one of the licenses. It also could be explicitly written to require both licenses to be preserved (with regard to the pre-existing material).

If the language isn't explicit, we probably won't know the answer until a court sets a legal precedent somewhere, so it is probably best to error on the side of safety.

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Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 6, 2007 7:45 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

In general yes.

But in this particular case, BSD+GPL, it has to be "take your pick", because the only alternative would be GPL-only. I'll explain.

If you aren't allowed to "take your pick", but are required to honour each and every term in *both* licenses, then it follows that not just every BSD-term must be followed, but also every GPL-term.

Everything that is allowed with a GPL-licenced program is however *also* allowed with a BSD-licenced one. But not vice-versa.

In other words, if you *pretend* that a BSD-licenced program is really GPL, you're still adhering to each and every term of the BSD-licence.

If on the other hand you pretend that a GPL-licenced program is really BSD, you're breaking quite a few terms of the GPL, namely those that require that you give changes back under the same terms when you redistribute.