Re: notable Debian contributions in 2006
Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> > Note that the license change was definitely not the reason for the fork (the
>> > fork would have been done in a different way if the license change was the
>> > reason).
>>
>> And again wrong, your license change *IS* the reason, we simply do not
>> accept incompatible licenses. No matter how much you love it.
>
> Repeating your wrong claims does not make them true....
Pot, kettle, black.
> While there are some cases, where the GPL is incompatible with other licenses
> (e.g. LGPL and CDDL),
For the first case, you are wrong; LGPL is *explicitly* compatible with
GPL [0]:
"3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public
License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do
this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that
they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2,
instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the
ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify
that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these
notices."
[0] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
For the second case, it is good that you finally acknowledge that GPL
and CDDL are in fact incompatible. I am glad we now have that public
admission from you.
> there are many cases where the GPL allows a combination of code.
Yes, and in every such case one of three things has happened: 1) the
non-GPL code has a license that is GPL compatible, 2) the author(s) of
the non-GPL code is willing to allow it to be relicensed to GPL, 3) the
author(s) of the GPL code is willing to make a special exemption to the
GPL to allow it to use non-GPL code (as is the case sometimes with GPL
programs that link to OpenSSL).
> Well known cases are e.g. when the GPL code is a derived work of _other_ code
Wrong. The history of now GPL-licensed code is irrelevant. If I am the
sole author of version 0.7 of some CDDL code and I decide to relicense
the next release, version 0.8, to GPL; or if I take a piece of existing
BSD code, modify it to be part of my GPL program, and relicense it to
GPL for consistency (an act that is permitted by the BSD license), that
piece of code is no longer able to be combined with other CDDL code. One
would have to go back and obtain the CDDL or BSD code as originally
licensed in order to combine it with other CDDL code.
> or when there is a "mere aggregation" of code from different "work"s.
> As this is true for what is done inside cdrtools
Wrong. If a single cdrtools binary includes both GPL code and CDDL code
(which I presume is the case; otherwise there would be no issue to
discuss), this is not "mere aggregation" [1]:
"In addition, mere aggregation of *another* work not based on the
Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a
volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the *other*
work under the scope of this License." (emphasis added)
[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
You would be hard-pressed to convince anyone that a single binary
executable (which just happens to be built from both GPL and CDDL code)
is more than one work, which would be necessary for the aggregation
clause to apply.
> cdrtools of course have no license problem.
You can say it all you want but that doesn't make it so.
HTH.
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
Reply to: