Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 16, 2007 8:23 UTC (Sun) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right by IkeTo
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

I think the BSD community - or at least Theo de Raadt - finally sees the value of a copyleft license. His interpretation that the BSDL already is a copyleft license however is severely flawed. It isn't. If OpenBSD was under MPL, it would be true, and commercial vendors still could include this code into proprietary projects - but then they would also be forced to contribute changes back (you can put MPL code into "larger works" under different licenses, but you still need to retain the MPL on the files originally under MPL, even if you have modified them - so a MPL project incorporated into a GPL project will be "dual-licensed" forever. There are many open questions about this - one is whether the GPL actually permits to be merged with MPL code without special permission by the authors - but that's the idea at least).

The moral implication however is clear: If we accept that it's ethical to share code (as both the FSF and the BSD proponent claim), then we find that it's also more ethical to make licenses compatible, because incompatible licenses prevent people to share code between projects. I fully agree with that part of Theo's diatribe.