Henning Makholm wrote:
Scripsit sean finney <seanius@seanius.net>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?No, it only has to be offered under a license that gives all of the freedoms that the GPL gives. It is OK to use a more permissive license, as long as it is GPL compatible.
Thus, it is fair to say that one may *assume* the right to relicense (or at least to use) the given source code under the terms of the GPL license. For example, if source code A contains (or is explicitly linked against) source code B where source code B is licensed under GPL, then source code A must be licensed with a license compatible with the GPL. Thus if a license is not provided with source code A, then the user may assume that A is licensed under *at most* the GPL (ie. the most restrictive license allowed by source code B). Then the user may modify the source code for A and release it as A' under GPL license. To release it under another license (like 3-clause BSD or MIT/X), the user must obtain the licensing terms under which source code A is distributed. I guess this might be the thing that Sean was asking. - Adam