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On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 10:34:47 +0100 Robin Cornelius <robin.cornelius@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Well dual licensing can get you into a sticky mess. I saw this starting > to wind up on wireless-dev over the last week. But its kind of exploded now! > > http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/07/09/01/2333233.shtml > http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Stealing_Versus_Sharing_Code > > I think the moral is don't dual licensing unless you *really* know what > you are doing or intending! especialy with licences that are not 100% > compatible. Dual-licencing cannot always be avoided. The problem with including BSD code in GPL code is that the final code is not fully under the protection of the GPL because it is also available under the BSD licence. Splitting the upstream codebase would seem to be the solution there - retain the BSD stuff under the BSD licence as a separately distributed (and packaged) program that is linked with the GPL code. This prevents the need for dual-licencing but is harder to achieve and maintain. It all depends on the amount of code and how it needs to be used. If the entire BSD snippet can be packaged into one or more function calls, it can be made into a separate library under just the BSD licence, called from your GPL-only program - no dual licencing is required. It all gets a lot more difficult in the kernel. Whichever way you cut it, dual-licencing of kernel stuff is a difficult area - you're damned if you include BSD code under the BSD licence and you're damned if you sequester BSD code under the GPL. The GPL allows you to include BSD code *without* dual licencing (by just including the attribution) but in situations where your changes may eventually benefit BSD, it's just plain rude to cut them out. The basic lesson is that once you include BSD code in GPL code, the combined code must always remain dual-licenced or the BSD people won't be able to use your changes. The problem comes when the code is later rewritten. So I'd say that the moral is ensure you *do* dual-licence GPL code that includes BSD code and retain that dual licence in future editions. If you can avoid having BSD and GPL in the same package then do so. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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