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

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Sun Aug 13 23:29:19 UTC 2006


On Sunday 13 August 2006 4:01 am, Glenn L McGrath wrote:
> 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.

The GPL says you can't add additional restrictions.

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

But are they _required_?

> 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.

If it's released ito the public domain, I can strip all mention of you out 
completely without violating any legal requirements.  It wouldn't be _polite_ 
(Attribution is probably actually _more_ important than ownership to the open 
source community, that's why I name the source of patches in each SVN commit 
I do even when it's a one character typo fix in a comment).

But in terms of license, "released into the public domain" is compatible with 
the GPL, yes. :)

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

Yeah, that's the kind of thing asking a lawyer about is good.  Over the years 
I've pinged these questions off of the lawyers for various companies I've 
worked for (the most extensive of which was probably the time a whole week's 
columns I did on IP law were reviewed by The Motley Fool's legal department) 
and bounced a lot of off-the-cuff questions off Cathy Raymond (Eric's wife, 
who art a lawyer).  I believe Erik Andersen bounces 'em off his dad.  Now we 
have the SFLC.

But my general policy on this is if I have to ask, I want to avoid having to 
deal with it.  Because one thing I learned is that lawyer's opinions are just 
that.  They vary from lawyer to lawyer and jurisdiction to jurisdiction 
(although luckily copyright is federal, but there are still lots of 
districts, and that's just US law).  We could ask the SFLC, and the FSF, and 
a local lawyer, and the end result is still just legal _opinions_.

Whole lotta "not going there" goin' on.  This may not be a real world concern 
if nobody ever tries to enforce this (who would have standing, anyway?) but I 
just don't want to worry about it.  Cleaning it out is actually removes the 
problem.  It's not high priority, but it is a to-do item of mine.

> 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,

If it's only needed for historical reasons, then we don't actually need it.  
If we're still required to carry it, then it's an additional restriction 
which paragraph 2 of section 6 of GPLv2 says you can't impose.

> 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.

I suspect it was put there to make the conflict between the two less 
obvious. :)

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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