Clarification of the ntpd applet license

Adam Tkac vonsch at gmail.com
Mon Dec 22 11:43:06 UTC 2014


On 12/08/2014 04:41 PM, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Adam Tkac <vonsch at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Henning Brauer, author of the openntpd (ntpd.c applet is based on it), asked
>> me to improve license and copyright statement of the ntpd.c applet and
>> explicitly mention openntpd license&copyright. Proposed patch is attached,
>> can you please include it? Thanks it advance.
>
> Copyright notice there is already a mess (both GPL and BSD ... that's wrong).
>
> With your patch, it adds another BSD clause. Also, ntpd_simple.c
> also needs fixing, right?
>
> Please submit a patch which replaces existing notice with a consistent one.

I'm not licensing expert but IMO it's impossible to merge all licenses 
into one statement as you wish. If you use existing code, you cannot 
change license unless you are author. If licenses differ for parts of 
code, all of them should be mentioned.

I dig on the Internet about possibility to "relicense" BSD code under 
GPL and it's not possible. However it's possible to license changes to 
BSD code under GPL. So in my opinion the best solution is to mention all 
of the license notices (from both OpenNTPd and NTPd) and license all 
busybox changes under GPL. What do you think about attached patch?

Once we agree on patch for ntpd.c, I will copy it for ntpd_simple.c.

Regards, Adam
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