svn 14760 (new diff applet)

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 07 April 2006 11:34 pm, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 09:35:45PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> > > You can GPL it but you can't just remove the existing license/copyright
> > > notice.
> >
> > If we can't remove the existing license, then we can't GPL it.  The GPL
> > says it must be under exactly those terms, with nothing added and nothing
> > removed.
> >
> > Are you saying we can't produce a derived work that is _not_ under the
> > BSD license?  Therefore we cannot enforce the terms of the GPL on our
> > derived work (I.E. get source code to derived versions), because even our
> > derived version must be licensed BSD, no matter what changes we've made?
>
> Whether you can remove the existing notice has nothing to do with
> whether the notice applies to new code added.

So you're saying the GPL can apply to just _parts_ of the file?  Because if 
the GPL applies to the whole file, then we can't be _required_ to apply 
additional license terms to the file.

I understand the concept of dual licensing, but that's two separate license 
grants from the original copyright holder, which includes the ability to 
ignore the ones you don't plan to use.  Busybox isn't dual licensed, it's 
GPL.

If only _parts_ of the file are dual licensed, then the file (as a whole) is 
not dual licensed, and the license notice is at the very least misleading.  
(I don't believe the GPL can apply to just part of a file anyway, but that's 
a separate issue.)

> Rich

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.