Help on relicensing derived code

[Carlos A. M. dos Santos]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Henrique Almeida<hdante at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/7/13 Carlos A. M. dos Santos <unixmania at gmail.com>:
>> On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Henrique Almeida<hdante at gmail.com> wrote:

>>>  I need to write an "errno.h" with constant values used by the FreeBSD
>>> kernel. My project uses exclusively the 2 clause BSD license. I
>>> expected to copy those values from FreeBSD errno.h. However, FreeBSD
>>> errno.h has 3 clauses.[...]
>>
>> Do you have any particular reason to refuse the current 3-clause license?
>
>  Yes, I've decided to choose uniform licensing for the whole project.
> I think it will be better for users this way.

I still don't see the point. The advertising clause was removed ten
years ago and the remaining 3 clauses impose just a few restrictions.

> I'll try to stick with that unless completelly impossible.

You can choose any license for code owned by you. You can also
relicense BSD-licensed code, but you still must either obey the
original license or obtain written permission to change the terms
[from the original copyright owner, University of Californa and
USL/Novell, not the FreeBSD project]. Take a look at

     http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20070114093427179

> Notice that I won't relicense the original code. I only need to
> relicense the derived work (my own version of errno.h), as described
> in the copyright law section of the following link:
>
>  http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html

If you are writing your own version of errno.h then it is not a
derived work. In this particular case, errno.h is just a list of error
codes so you can copy/paste the numbers and mnemonics from the output
of "man 2 intro". That would be considered "compatible code", not
derived work. Please refer to the last two paragraphs of the
"Pretrial" section at

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi#Pretrial

>  Maybe we could find a lawyer to explain that. :-/

May be you could just accept the current license and avoid the pain. ;-)

-- 
My preferred quotation of Robert Louis Stevenson is "You cannot
make an omelette without breaking eggs". Not because I like the
omelettes, but because I like the sound of eggs being broken.