Re: KDE not in Debian?

[David Welton <davidw@master.debian.org>]

As KDE appears to have a licensing list, so Debian has a debian-legal
list, which is the appropriate forum for these discussions.

The CC reflects that.

On Fri, Jan 28, 2000 at 03:00:40AM -0500, Andreas Pour wrote:

> Errh, I keep hearing this misconception that BSD code can be
> relicensed as GPL code, but can not figure out where it comes from.
> How can you re-license BSD *source code* as GPL code?
 
> The author of BSD code has told me (and everyone else for that
> matter) that I can redistribute it w/out following the requirements
> of the GPL (all I have to comply with is the far fewer conditions
> placed in the BSD license).  Now you want to tell me that, by virtue
> of someone adding a line of GPL code to it, that the whole kit and
> kaboodle has been converted to GPL and I can no longer do what the
> author of the BSD code told me I can do (namely, redistribute it
> without complying with the GPL)?  Well, if you try to do that, I can
> remove that line of code and say forget you, I will distribute the
> code in compliance with BSD but in violation of the GPL.  And what
> is your remedy for this act of mine?  Can you stop me from doing it?
> No, obviously not.  What does that mean?  That the GPL does not
> apply to the "modified work as a whole" -- i.e. to the BSD code.
> That is, the BSD code is not under the GPL.  This is so obvious, I
> find it hard to believe people keep spreading this interpretation of
> yours as if it were true.

That is true.  Of course, if it's more than one line of code, and the
additions are woven in with the old code, it might be quite difficult
to seperate the two.  You can always go back to the old BSD licensed
code, though.

There are some pretty good examples, though, if you don't mind my
saying so, of code where people have forgotten about the original BSD
code and gone with the extended proprietary code - SunOS and
derivitives of early postgres code come to mind.  There is even more
temptation if the changes are only GPL'ed - it's still free software.

I knew a guy at Intel once who said that they would have just loved to
have taken the GCC sources, and added a whole bunch of optimizations
to them, and made their own proprietary compiler.

Ciao,
-- 
  David N. Welton -+- davidw@prosa.it -+- http://www.efn.org/~davidw