Is it possible to change BSD licence to GPL for 4.4BSD-Lite's source code?

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Sun, 04 May 2008 23:56:33 +0800
> From: kevin <hlwhyw at 81890.net>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-net at freebsd.org
> 
> Hi, all
> I want to port 4.4BSD-Lite's TCP/IP source code to my own OS kernel.
> My OS kernel is GPL licenced.
> Is it possible for me to modify 4.4BSD-Lite's source code and change
> its licence from 4.4BSD-Lite licence to GPL licence?

I am not a lawyer, but it is generally not possible to re-license BSD
code to GPL. It might be possible, with the permission of the code's
author(s), to dual license it under both BSD and GPL.

It is unclear to me why adding BSD code to a GPL OS would violate any of
the terms of either license as ling as you maintain the copyright notice
for the BSD code and follow the GPL redistribution rules and other
conditions. I don't believe that anything in GPL prohibits the use of
non-GPL code as long as the terms of the GPL are adhered to.

Finally, 4.4BSD-Lite is very, very old and lacks a great many features
needed in a modern network stack. I really don't see why you would want
to do this.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751
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