Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 14:58 UTC (Fri) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by raof
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

You can always use the GPL and add an exception for linking. It's used by a few FSF projects too (e.g. pre-GPLv3 libgcc).

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 17:54 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

I actually like the better technical language in GPLv3, but I'm a bit too scared about the interaction of additional clauses and the license itself. Can a clause override something in the license itself?

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 0:23 UTC (Sun) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (2 responses)

IANAL, but generally it is accepted that you, as the author, can grant additional freedoms on top of the license you chose. That's why the FSF has used "linking exceptions" in some of their projects, and other projects (like OpenSSL) have done the same.

In virtually all countries, copyright rules are largely in favor of the author. The only thing an author can't do is say "license A + license B are compatible" without modification if the rules of the licenses are written to not be so. So essentially, you can't be delusional.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 2:48 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

It's one thing is an exception clarifies some license clauuse (like: "We don't consider static linking to produce a derived work"), but if your exemption clearly contradicts another license clause then situation becomes more interesting. I wouldn't risk it, personally.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 22, 2015 8:20 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Personally, I'd say that if X licences their code under licence Y, but says that licence Z is compatible, then that means that in case of argument licence Z wins.

X has effectively said "you can licence my code under Z", but if the people who own other code Z don't want it licenced under Y, then it isn't available under Y.

Cheers,
Wol