Christian Rose wrote:
> mån 2003-05-12 klockan 10.54 skrev David Neary:
> > > Clearly, it's the advertising clause that causes problems.
> >
> > Ah. That clears things up. Almost all of the questionable code
> > (including the gif code, and the nlfilt code) is not BSD licenced
> > in the old sense, only in the new sense.
>
> I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do and what you're
> trying to accomplish.
It's entirely possible that I am misunderstanding the issue.
As I understand it, there are two separate issue - licencing and
copyright. Copyright of the code in question will, of course,
rest with the original author.
Licencing, on the other hand, consists of a series of conditions
which govern the distribution of the product. In the case of the
gimp, the licence (if it can be called that) on the code in
question is of the type
/* Copyright Joe Bloggs 1947
*
* You are free to do whatever you want with this, just keep this
* comment in future versions to let people know I was the
* original author.
*/
I understood this to be what people refer to as a BSD type
licence (it obviously is not the BSD licence). The questionable
code is this code.
My understanding of the GPL is that if you include code in a GPL
application, you must release that code under the GPL. And there
is the issue.
> But a change in license requires the copyright owner's permission, as
> one of the fundamentals of copyright is that the copyright owner solely
> determines the conditions (the license). Thus, it seems like overkill to
> ask, and get permission from, the authors (copyright owners) of all
> non-GPL files for relicensing to GPL when it may not be needed in all
> cases.
I disagree with you here, as much code under modified BSD
licences, or in the public domain, has been licenced under
licences other than their original licence without the author's
permission (see, as an example, the TCP stack in Windows NT). In
fact, the artistic/BSD/X11/Apache type licences have no problem
with people using their code under a different licence.
GPL licenced code requires relicencing of derivative works under
the same licence, but most free software licences do not have
this requirement.
I believe that the GPL requires us to relicence this code to the
GPL, or stop distributing it. I believe that we can relicence it
without the consent of the original authors, because the licence
with which the code was distributed permits it. As I understand
it, what GNU calls a "GPL compatible licence" is "a licence which
permits derived works to be GPL licenced".
> The discussion turned unnecessarily broad in scope and was only loosely
> connected to the GIMP problem. If you intend to keep it connected to the
> GIMP problem, I fully agree that keeping it on this list is the best
> thing to do.
My fault :) Imprecision in the type of discussion where precise
language is required.aHopefully this mail will clear things up.
Cheers,
Dave.
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx
