Re: KDE not in Debian?
On Mon, Jan 31, 2000 at 05:07:45AM -0500, Andreas Pour wrote:
>
> Jeff Licquia wrote:
>
> > This is all true. However, the BSD licensing terms are not being
> > violated, are they? There is no clause in the BSD license that
> > requires me to redistribute under the same terms; it simply gives me
> > blanket permissions to redistribute, subject to these three
> > conditions, none of which say anything about my right to place added
> > restrictions.
>
> I think you stated at some other point that if a right is not granted you
> don't have it. I
> think we agree that under copyright law you normally do not have a right to
> make copies and
> redistribute. The BSD license says you can redistribute. To go from that
> to say you can
> redistribute under any terms, rather than continuing to distribute under the
> original terms,
> you want is IMHO a stretch. Maybe a court would rule so if the situation
> arose, but as you
> appear to be concerned about the threat of a lawsuit and/or complying with a
> social contract
> I would think this uncertainty would trouble you as well.
There is no uncertainty in this case. You are distributing under the original
terms. You only added some other terms (that are not in contradiction with the
original terms since the GPL also mentions them).
> Now in the case of UCB code in particular, IIRC they may be on public record
> as not
> objecting to such redistributions, but that does not mean all authors who
> use the BSD
> license concur. I would note as well that KDE developers are on public
> record as not
> objecting to distributing their code with Qt.
This is an entirely different case. With code distributed under both the QPL
(QT) and GPL (KDE) you have not just merged some distribution terms. The
distribution terms are also in conflict with each other. (And one of the terms
in the GPL explicitly says that you cannot distribute in that case.)
Could you please contact the FSF or RMS about such licensing issues if you are
not sure about them. They have legal advisors that can explain such things to
you. I did when I had questions about combining BSD and GPL code and they
explained all the issues to me. For example why GPL code could not be combined
with code licensed under the old BSD license which is possible with the current
BSD license (the advertise clause is an added restriction which the GPL does
not have). If something is unclear then they can ask for legal advise which is
much better then speculating on some mailinglist.
You can also consult <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html>
which explains what licenses are free and what licenses are compatible with
the GPL. It also explains how to resolve some conflicts for your program when
combining distribution terms of licenses not compatible with the GPL (such as
the QPL) by adding appropriate notices.
Hope that helps,
Mark
P.S. Could you please not make your lines longer then 80 characters?
Reply to: