On Di, 2010-03-16 at 10:57 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote: > On 03/16/2010 07:11 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote: > > Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus <stefan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > >> The licensing list [1] states that the license "BSD with advertising" is > >> not compatible with GPLv2/v3. But what means compatible? For example, I > >> would like to use/create a package for a library which is released as > >> "BSD with advertising". Consider an application licensed as GPLv2 which > >> uses the shared library. Is this allowed? In this case the library would > >> be licensed as "BSD with advertising" and the application which uses > >> that library as GPLv2. If I remember right, then there was some kind of > >> clause in the GPLv2/v3 license which said that even linking against such > >> a library is not allowed but I'm really not sure. Maybe my mind plays > >> tricks with me ;-) > > > > The GPLv2 permits to link against any independently developed library (which > > therefore is an independend work) regardless of the license of the library. > > Stefan, > > Please note that Mr. Schilling does not speak in any way for the Fedora > Project, and his... unique... license interpretations are not correct > for Fedora. > > There is a linking incompatibility between a library with a license of > "BSD with advertising" and a binary with a license of "GPLv2" (or v3, > for that matter). You should double check that the license on that > library is actually BSD with advertising (if the copyright holder is the > Regents of the University of California, the advertising clause has been > dropped). This was exactly the same I had in mind. I just wasn't sure because I heard the same when I attended a conference presentation but didn't get anything written down. So I was unsure. > If you can let me know which library is in use, I would be > happy to look into this for you. The library I'm talking about is OpenDKIM (actually it's kind of a daemon and a library, but I want to use the library from GPLv2 code) which uses at the moment a 4-clause-BSD license: http://www.opendkim.org/license.html A confirmation if it is really a BSD-with-advertisement license is very welcomed. > If it is actually BSD with advertising, I would ask the upstream if they > would be willing to drop the advertising clause, as they may be unaware > of the problems it causes. If they are not, the alternative would be for > the copyright holder of the GPLv2'd code to add an explicit exception to > permit this scenario, and we could propose some suggested exception text > to them. I already contacted upstream and now I'm waiting for their response. I also would like to package OpenDKIM for Fedora but I think as long as upstream uses BSD-with-advertising it does not make much sense. It would hurt Fedora more than help, I guess. Thanks for your message, Stefan _______________________________________________ legal mailing list legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/legal
