Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 12:33 UTC (Wed) by dtucker (subscriber, #6575)
In reply to: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right by bojan
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

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.

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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.