On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 05:09:12PM -0500, sean finney said > hey rob (and -legal), > > thanks for following up with me on this. > > On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 02:08:40AM +1100, Rob Weir wrote: > > > * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted > > > * provided that this entire copyright notice is duplicated in all such > > > * copies. > > i think you and i interpreted this differently. of course if there is > any ambiguity, i should probably clear that up with them. to me, > "Redistribution and use in source and binary" seemed to imply > "redistribution in source and binary" and "use in source and binary", > with the "use" of source including modification. but maybe i'm just > reading into that too liberally. Unfortunately, if a permission isn't granted explicitly, you don't have it, no matter what the author intended. Of course, if the author intended what you said, he/she/it is unlikely to sue...but you need to get the magic "modification" word in there. > > > however, it's also built against the gnu regexp library, which is GPL'd. > > > am i right in assuming that the software is then implicitly under > > > the GPL? > > > > No, the above license is also incompatible with the GPL (since you don't > > have the right to distribute modified versions), which means you can't > > distribute it at all (even in non-free). > > so then technically they can't even redistribute it, because their > program is built including GPL'd code? Depends what "including" means. If the actual source is a combination of code under this license and the GPL, it's not distributable at all. If it links against a GPL library at run time, then it's probably just the binaries that are undistributable. > > You'll need to get them to grant permission to distribute modified > > copies; re-licensing it under the 3-clause BSD or MIT/X licenses (which > > are both DFSG-free and GPL-compatible) would work, and sound like they > > do what upstream wants, anyway. > > if the code includes gpl source code, doesn't that mean the code has to > be GPL'd too? As Henning said, it just needs to be under a license at least as Free (ie can't have any more restrictions than the GPL itself, but it can certainly have *less*) as the GPL; such licenses are called "GPL-compatible". The MIT/X and BSD licenses are good examples of GPL-compatible "do whatever you want but don't say you wrote it" licenses. > > * Copyright 1995-1999 by DFN-CERT. All rights reserved. > > i'll try to follow up with DFN-CERT to get a clarification on this > before i do any serious packaging work. Excellent. -- Rob Weir <rweir@ertius.org> | mlspam@ertius.org | Do I look like I want a CC? Words of the day: arrangements clandestine ICE world domination FIPS140
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