Re: GPL compatibility of DFCL
On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Branden Robinson wrote:
> Well, do you or don't you think the material I quoted from the GPL text
> above is applicable in this situation?
Covered, but still unclear. I need to get my head around the difference
between "aggregation" and "derivation", and the duties they imposes on a
distributor to determine underlying license on any part he wants to
release seperately. It seems hard to believe that if I recieve a package
under the GPL, that I can't just treat the whole thing as GPL unless I
choose to track down a different license on part of it.
> No, you cannot take an MITed work and just slap the GPL on it. The MIT
> license *is* compatible with the GPL, but that doesn't mean that
> original author's copyright doesn't apply.
But you CAN take an MITed work, make a (subjectively defined) nontrivial
change, and release the result under the GPL. And a recipient can make
further changes, etc. Soon it becomes impossible to know what changes are
GPL and what "original work" is MIT. Does this mean it's now
undistributable, as I can't know whether I must use GPL or MIT for a
random function I'd like to use elsewhwere?
> Now you grab the source to GNUFree86 4.3. Under what terms are the
> files licensed to you? The answer: the NVidia driver that the FSF wrote
> is under the GNU GPL. The rest, even the FSF's changes to
> xf86PciInfo.h, remain under the XFree86 license.
Ok, now I make some modifications to generate GFree86-4.3-light, by
deleting a bunch of stuff. Is it my duty to determine that I've removed
"enough" of the FSF code that the package is no longer an aggregate of
copyrightable FSF code and MIT? I'm certainly allowed to do so, but I
didn't know it was required.
> Here's a question for you. If I get my mitts on the source code to
> Windows 2000, and change one line in a source file, can I then
> distribute that source file under any license I want?
What? Nobody claimed that any random license (or unlicensed code) can be
converted to some other arbitrary license. The discussion is whether
there can be a GPL-compatible license that cannot be converted into pure
GPL.
If you got it under a GPL-compatible license, you can aggregate it with a
GPL installer or make a GPLed modification to it and distribute THAT under
the GPL. It's an open question (to me) whether a derivative of that
aggregation automatically gets converted back to the original license.
But this is exactly what you're saying, so I'll believe it. Thanks for
the clarification.
--
Mark Rafn dagon@dagon.net <http://www.dagon.net/>
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