Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:

> On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 10:41:50AM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
>> > Interesting point. Still it would cause problem to upstream to integrate your
>> > patch, because he cannot easily merge a GPL 2 only patch into a GPL 2 or later
>> > original work, since it would obviously force him to drop the "or later" part
>> > of the original work in the merged work.
>> 
>> Well, sort of.  *His* part is still available under as liberal a
>> license as he likes.  *My* part is under exactly the license I like.
>
> No, the combined work is under GPL 2 only. There is no *part* thingy. Once you
> build binaries with all of it, then you build binaries, and you have to
> consider the derived work as a whole.

There certainly is -- it's a work containing the works of others.  My
part is available under some license, his part is under some license,
and the whole thing is available under some license.  The GPL's clause
2b restricts that last license to be at least as permissive as the
GPLv2.

>> If he had offered his under "GPL or BSD, your choice!" and I submitted

To be very clear, I should have said "submitted changed *under the GPL
v2*" here.

>> changes, he would only be able to use those under the GPL.  "GPL v2 or
>> v3, your choice!" is no different.  GPL 9 is there so that I *can*
>> release mine under "GPL v2 or later" and he can then integrate it into
>> his, because there's explicit definition of what this means and how it
>> works with the rest of the GPL.
>
> Ok.
>
>> It's certainly very different, now that we've looked at it closely,
>> from the QPL 3b insistence that modifiers provide more permissive
>> licenses to the initial developer -- the GPL doesn't require any
>> license to the initial developer unless he's offered a copy, and then
>> only requires its own exact terms.
>
> Well, but if the original program is of the GPL v2 or later kind, and you
> release it as GPL v2, then your patch is unusable to upstream, and in
> particular cannot be relicenced under the GPL v3.

Upstream is unwilling to use it, maybe.  That's not the same thing as
unusable -- it's usable if he's willing to deal with the same freedoms
I had from him.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu