Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 00:19:45 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: walton@nordicrecords.com Cc: des@flood.ping.uio.no, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Berkeley removes Advertising Clause Message-ID: <199909080019.RAA14584@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990903231722.7492.qmail@modgud.nordicrecords.com> from "Dave Walton" at Sep 3, 99 04:15:03 pm
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> On 3 Sep 99, at 10:10, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > > The advertising clause is a "further restriction" which conflicts with > > the GPL's requirement that "no further restrictions" be placed on the > > code. > > Yes, but that isn't the only "restriction" in the BSD license. So > what does it change? There are no other "restrictions" in the UCB license that are not also already in the GPL. The specific wording of clause 6b of the GPL is "no additional restrictions". The "Claim Credit" clause, sometimes wrongly called the advertising caluse by people who don't understand that it does not invoke unless you try to claim credit for the code, counted as an "additional restriction". FWIW, it's always been possible to get the same effect as the GPL against the UCB code base by adopting a "Sleepy Cat" style license, to wit: http://www.sleepycat.com/license.net Or a "Sendmail" style license, to wit: http://www.sendmail.org/license-info.html The GPL itself was specifically "poison-pilled" against UCB licensed code. This was a political choice made by the authors of the GPL, and not specifically necessary (or even very intelligent). The reason very few people have tried to take UCB code "private" like Sleepy Cat has taken the Berkeley db code post 1.86 and Sendmail, Inc. has taken the sendmail code, ca. Sendmail 8.9.x, is that there are volunteer maintainers, and because, except in rare cases, such as the previous two, it seriously damages the utility of the code for future generations. It may well be that someone will attempt to GPL all of the BSD4.4 code. It may also be that Jordan Hubbard will have success pushing the 2 caluse license, thus allowing a FreeBSD distribution to be GPL'ed. But unless you are a moron undeserving of a Computer Science degree due to your not planning on benefitting financially from your work in the field at some future date, you won't do this. > > The removal of the advertising clause makes it possible to > > relicense BSD code under the GPL. > > Does it? Only the copyright holder can change the license, and > they can do that whether or not there is an advertising clause. > Removal of that clause doesn't allow a third party to change the > license, because they don't have that right. It makes it possible to license unmodified BSD4.4-Lite2 derived code under GPL (assuming it's not a hoax). It does not make it possible to redistribute all of FreeBSD under those same terms. Smart people, like Poul-Henning and others (myself included) have donated code that is integral to FreeBSD, and under license terms which continue to conflict with clause 6b of the GPL, and will fight to keep things that way. If the GPL people want to subsume that code, then they will have to change the GPL's caluse 6b to not be gratuitously conflicting. Buying Poul-Henning a beer is probably not something he'll give up willingly. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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