Dave Jones apparently doesn't think BSD is GPL-compatible either...

Glenn L McGrath bug1 at ihug.co.nz
Sun Aug 13 08:01:38 UTC 2006


On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 20:17:40 -0400
Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/48630.html
> 
> See the comments.
> 
> Yeah, we need to rewrite some of the BusyBox apps for 1.3...
> 
> Rob


Is this something the software freedom law center could give us an
opinion on ?

I would have thought, "must retain the above copyright notice" might
have a different meaning than say, licenced under the above terms.

i.e. that the BSD terms could be included as documentation rather
than legal text.

Hypothetical example, i write a GPL program which outputs information
about various licences, i could have two strings.

const char *mine = "Copyright Glenn McGrath, all rights reserved";
const char *yours = "Copyright Glenn Mcgraht, released into the public
domain";

Even though the program includes Copyright text, its not being used
in a licensing context, so i could release this hypothetical program
under a license independent of whats included in those two variables.

Similarly, i think "retains" implies something completly different than
if it had said "licensed".

So my opinion is that we need to include the licence text, we just need
to have a notice before it explaining that the text is onyl included
for historical reasons, and its a license. I believe this is why the
BSD licence was pushed to the bottom of some files, so its out of the
way.


Glenn



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