svn 14760 (new diff applet)

[Rob Landley]

On Thursday 06 April 2006 5:22 pm, Todd C. Miller wrote:
> In message <200604061358.56329.rob at landley.net>
>
> 	so spake Rob Landley (rob):
> > Yea rah cool, new diff applet!
> >
> > http://busybox.net/downloads/patches/svn-14760.patch
> >
> > License question.  The BSD boilerplate says this:
> >
> > + * Permission to
> > + * use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
> > + * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the
> > above + * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all
> > copies.
> >
> > Followed by a boilerplate about as long as the full GPL one.
> >
> > This seems to means that the file must remain BSD licensed and cannot be
> > relicensed GPL.  (If this permission notice must appear in all copies,
> > even derived works, then you cannot require derived works to be under the
> > GPL only.  The GPL removes the right to ship binaries without source...)
>
> No, it just means you cannot remove the existing copyright notice.

Agreed.  That's copyright law: you can't strip off somebody else's copyright 
notice.

> You can GPL it but you can't just remove the existing license/copyright
> notice.

If we can't remove the existing license, then we can't GPL it.  The GPL says 
it must be under exactly those terms, with nothing added and nothing removed.

Are you saying we can't produce a derived work that is _not_ under the BSD 
license?  Therefore we cannot enforce the terms of the GPL on our derived 
work (I.E. get source code to derived versions), because even our derived 
version must be licensed BSD, no matter what changes we've made?

>  - todd

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.