> The piece of code in question was dual licensed, both GPL and BSD, which makes it fully legit to distribute derivate work under the GPL license.
As I understand it, not all of it was (it was some BSD-only code). But even if all of it was dual-license, only a court of law could decide whether your conclusion is correct. I cross my fingers here hoping that no one asserts differently: that conversation is so crushingly dull. ;-)
> If they get so upset about this, perhaps they have to reconsider their licensing scheme completely.
If you're uninterested in the social fallout, that's fair enough. I suppose the original mistake here was for the original copyright holder to agree to dual-license the code in the first place. I won't ever do that now for my own BSD code after reading that thread.
fallout
Posted bytorkelat
2007-09-03 08:32 AM
I'm interessed in the social fallout, but what can we do? The original author said they had their right to GPL the code, so there is nothing we can do about it. Ofcourse I can understand why Theo de Raadt and the guys are angry about this, the GPL and BSD license should work better together. On the other hand this wouldn't have been any news if Theo didn't yell about it. The whole point of the BSD license is to give absolute freedom to it's users, also freedom to not contribute back to the original authors. But when GPL guys do this, it's apparently not ok :/
Anyways, they should try to solve this bsd / gpl issue more of these issues arise, we need developers on 'both' sides.
1188839665
Posted bychrismat
2007-09-03 01:14 PM
> I'm interessed in the social fallout, but what can we do? The original author said they had their right to GPL the code, so there is nothing we can do about it.
Again, I believe only a court of law could decide whether the copyright holder(s) intended that dual-licensed code could be redistributed under the terms of only one of the licenses (the GPL), as opposed to both licenses, or an amalgamation of the licenses (aka "the dual license").
>The whole point of the BSD license is to give absolute freedom to it's users, also freedom to not contribute back to the original authors. But when GPL guys do this, it's apparently not ok :/
Different issue, but yes, this is the social interaction that interests me. It has nothing to do with legal stuff. While it's legal, it's pretty gauche to slap a new license on someone else's work and redistribute it under the new license terms (even if it's 100% legal) without some sort of consideration (at least a phone call or an email!). I think it's particularly gauche when that new license is the GPL, because you're essentially creating two public forks of the same code base and these two forks tend to compete for open source developer time, which is usually the only currency that's worth anything for community projects. I'm not claiming it's illegal, or even immoral, it's just gauche.
> Anyways, they should try to solve this bsd / gpl issue more of these issues arise, we need developers on 'both' sides.
As I understand it, not all of it was (it was some BSD-only code). But even if all of it was dual-license, only a court of law could decide whether your conclusion is correct. I cross my fingers here hoping that no one asserts differently: that conversation is so crushingly dull. ;-)
> If they get so upset about this, perhaps they have to reconsider their licensing scheme completely.
If you're uninterested in the social fallout, that's fair enough. I suppose the original mistake here was for the original copyright holder to agree to dual-license the code in the first place. I won't ever do that now for my own BSD code after reading that thread.
Anyways, they should try to solve this bsd / gpl issue more of these issues arise, we need developers on 'both' sides.
Again, I believe only a court of law could decide whether the copyright holder(s) intended that dual-licensed code could be redistributed under the terms of only one of the licenses (the GPL), as opposed to both licenses, or an amalgamation of the licenses (aka "the dual license").
>The whole point of the BSD license is to give absolute freedom to it's users, also freedom to not contribute back to the original authors. But when GPL guys do this, it's apparently not ok :/
Different issue, but yes, this is the social interaction that interests me. It has nothing to do with legal stuff. While it's legal, it's pretty gauche to slap a new license on someone else's work and redistribute it under the new license terms (even if it's 100% legal) without some sort of consideration (at least a phone call or an email!). I think it's particularly gauche when that new license is the GPL, because you're essentially creating two public forks of the same code base and these two forks tend to compete for open source developer time, which is usually the only currency that's worth anything for community projects. I'm not claiming it's illegal, or even immoral, it's just gauche.
> Anyways, they should try to solve this bsd / gpl issue more of these issues arise, we need developers on 'both' sides.
I think I'd rather there weren't sides.