Clarification of the ntpd applet license

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Adam Tkac <vonsch at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/08/2014 04:41 PM, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Adam Tkac <vonsch at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Henning Brauer, author of the openntpd (ntpd.c applet is based on it),
>>> asked
>>> me to improve license and copyright statement of the ntpd.c applet and
>>> explicitly mention openntpd license&copyright. Proposed patch is
>>> attached,
>>> can you please include it? Thanks it advance.
>>
>> Copyright notice there is already a mess (both GPL and BSD ... that's
>> wrong).
>>
>> With your patch, it adds another BSD clause. Also, ntpd_simple.c
>> also needs fixing, right?
>>
>> Please submit a patch which replaces existing notice with a consistent
>> one.
>
>
> I'm not licensing expert but IMO it's impossible to merge all licenses into
> one statement as you wish. If you use existing code, you cannot change
> license unless you are author. If licenses differ for parts of code, all of
> them should be mentioned.
>
> I dig on the Internet about possibility to "relicense" BSD code under GPL
> and it's not possible. However it's possible to license changes to BSD code
> under GPL. So in my opinion the best solution is to mention all of the
> license notices (from both OpenNTPd and NTPd) and license all busybox
> changes under GPL. What do you think about attached patch?

Basically it says that the original source is under BSD license
and all changes are under GPL. This is possibly legal, but surely is a mess
(whoever would want to disentangle it will need to discover the original).

How about just respecting original authors' BSD license?
I'm not a license zealot.
You and me, as authors, still can re-license all our changes.
-- 
vda