Re: RFS: enblend

[Adeodato Simó <dato@net.com.org.es>]

* Sebastian Harl [Wed, 30 May 2007 00:15:03 +0200]:

>   - The files under src/win32helpers are released under the 4-clause BSD
> 	license which is incompatible with the GPL. Thus distributing them as part
> 	of a GPL'ed program is illegal - the .orig.tar.gz should be repackaged to
> 	not include those files (they are only needed under Windows anyway) and
> 	'+dfsg' should be added to the version number.

Two issues here:

  - works under a 4-clause BSD license where the copyright holder is the
    University of California are effectively under a 3-clause BSD license,
    as per ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change.

  - even then, it is perfectly fine to *distribute* in a same tarball
    these incompatible works, as long as they are not linked together
    (and since they're under win32helpers, I assume they're not on Unix
    systems). (If they link together, what you can't distribute is the
    resulting binary; for that, the copyright holder of the GPL part of
    the source would have to provide an exception allowing for such
    linkage.)

HTH, and thanks to Jacobo Tarrío for confirming that my ideas about this
were correct.

-- 
Adeodato Simó                                     dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer                                  adeodato at debian.org
 
Testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence.
                -- Dijkstra