BSD legal question
Danny Pansters
danny at ricin.com
Wed May 18 19:48:03 PDT 2005
On Thursday 19 May 2005 03:06, Daniel S. Wilkerson wrote:
> I have a rather strange legal question that I'm not sure who to ask of; it
> is about GPL vs. BSD but not about the FreeBSD project directly. Asking
> someone at the university is the last thing I want to do. Do you have
> someone who answers legal questions? It is rather pro-BSD so I didn't
> want to write the FSF. I'll spare you the question itself if you are not
> interested.
>
> Daniel Wilkerson
Joel is right, if you don't ask the real question we can't comment anyway. And
for all the lawyer talk, I say read the texts and apply logic. That gets you
insight also and it doesn't cost and the knowledge lasts forever.
But if we're going into this anyway, here's an interesting point that people
tend to dabble about: One common misperception even in the *BSD world IMHO is
that if you use and alter GPL code you have to release your work under GPL
also. I don't think that's true. All that's required is that you provide the
sourcecode to your changes (pedantically: only if asked for). If you do that
under whichever license that pleases you, you're OK. It's the next guy who
wants to release (in effect relicense as GPL sees it, not as BSDL sees at it)
that code and anything used by it that may get a headache (if they don't
provide source). It's also their problem not yours. A better term may be
redistibute BTW because that's what's at least copyright is about. User
licenses are about both use and reproduction/redistribution.
By extension I consider the LGPL for things like libraries and toolkits
effectively as BSD or MIT. Otherwise you might as well GPL all content you
see with mplayer (which is legally impossible to begin with because the
content was never theirs, same with original source code that merely uses a
library or a toolkit or some other API that may be GPL'ed).
In any event, except when you use public domain, any copyright declarations
and terms of acknowledgement stay valid by automagic copyright law being
applied. IIUC the problem with public domain is that although you discard
copyrights then you can still be held liable, but I'm not sure about that.
The BSD and MIT (and others like python, mozilla, apache, qpl, ...) solve
that and most have some modest way of crediting.
Anyway, that's how I understand things. Now if you have anything specific to
ask, please do and do so on the list. That way you'll likely get the most and
best responses.
HTH,
Dan
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