Re: Combining GPL and BSD/CeCILL/whatever
> > Do you mean you don't know which bits have whose copyright? Yow!
>
> That's not particularly hard or unusual; just merge two people's code
> together and let it go through a year or two of refactoring.
Yes, this's the kind of scenario I was thinking of.
What do you think of the following formula:
Copyright (C)
<years> <author of the GPL'd stuff>
<years> <author of the MIT'd stuff>
...
This program is governed by *all* of the following licenses:
...GPL text...
...MIT text...
....
This doesn't specify which parts were originally under which license but 1) it
would be impossible anyway given that they're all mingled and 2) does it
really matter as GPL insists licensing the whole bunch under GPL?
The downside of this scheme (if it's allowed at all?) is that people who want
to reuse some of the code have to copy both license texts, too, and in
theory, the list may just grow and grow as time goes by.
Hmm.. Actually, perhaps for new works, it would be worthwhile to have a
license that would be otherwise identical to e.g. MIT but also explicitly
allowed pure relicensing:
"You may also omit this license text (but not the copyright notices) if you
redistribute the work, modified or verbatim, under a different license
that contains equal requirements or a more restricting superset of them.
(Such licenses include but are not limited to GNU GPL version 2 or later.)"
This ("convertible MIT license"?) would, IMO, be a really nice way to avoid
the "license drag-on" and the confusion it causes. I don't know who would be
willing to promote one, though. Do you know any such licenses already?
- Jarno
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