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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