Les Mikesell wrote:
Alexandre Oliva wrote:
In accepting it's terms you give up your freedom to
distribute any part of the work under different terms, including any of
your own that you might want to add.
Since you never had any such freedom under copyright law, you aren't
giving anything up.
You don't have just have 'permission' to redistribute under GPL terms,
you have a mandate not to distribute any part of the whole under any
other terms. It's not unilateral - you must give up your freedom.
I don't believe that to actually be the case. You've repeatedly
insisted that the GPL replaces other license's terms, but I believe that
you are mistaken.
If you take Project X, distributed under the GPL, and implement feature
A under a BSD license, when you distribute your improved version, the
GPL protects the users by guaranteeing them all of the rights covered by
the GPL. That is, you may not impose additional restrictions on their
use or redistribution of your improved version of Project X. This is
what Alexandre is referring to as "power"; if you placed additional
restrictions on your users, you would be exerting a kind of power
granted by copyright law and restricting their freedom.
However, the GPL does not replace the terms of your license on your
code. If you grant users redistribution rights to the source code for
feature A under a BSD license, then those users may use *that source
code* in any way that's allowed by your license. They can't use the
entire work under your more permissive license, but they can use the
source code that *you* wrote, as governed by *your* license.
Do you see, now, how the "work as a whole" clause does not replace the
terms of your license? The terms of your license will always apply to
your code, and no other license can change that under copyright law.
The GPL's terms must only be met when distributing the combined work.
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