Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 5, 2007 13:38 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (guest, #31386)
In reply to: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right by dtucker
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

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.