Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2002 21:12:09 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Ian Pulsford <ianjp@optusnet.com.au>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Abuses of the BSD license? Message-ID: <20020406191209.GA3203@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <3CAEE4A1.315CF53@mindspring.com> References: <200204051922.06556@silver.dt1.binity.net> <3CAE7037.801FB15F@optusnet.com.au> <3CAEA028.186ED53E@optusnet.com.au> <20020406105111.A90057@lpt.ens.fr> <3CAEDDD2.2ADA819F@mindspring.com> <20020406114505.GA2576@lpt.ens.fr> <3CAEE4A1.315CF53@mindspring.com>
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Terry Lambert said on Apr 6, 2002 at 04:05:53:
> Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> > > > (a) Copyright notice != license. Yes, you must retain the notice.
> > > > It doesn't say anything about how you may license the code to
> > > > third parties.
> > >
> > > "This notice" is inclusive. You can't delete lines out of
> > > the middle of it, and claim continued compliance. This means
> > > you must leave the license terms intact.
> >
> > So if Microsoft used the BSD implementation of ftp, they must give it
> > to you under the BSD license?
>
> They must reproduce the license in their documentation,
> somewhere.
>
> Whether they have to let you copy the binary around has
> not really been determined by a court. I think if the
> code was unmodified (it's not), then the answer is probably
> "yes".
OK, I think the point is this. You got the BSD code under the BSD
licence, which is the file /COPYRIGHT in FreeBSD.
The sentence
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
must be interpreted to mean the entire file, up to and including the
disclaimer in capital letters, should be included in redistribution,
either as part of the source files or as part of the documentation.
Effectively, you must ship the BSD licence with your project.
If that statement is wrong, I'd like to know exactly why.
Now, if you have to ship the BSD licence with your code:
For your own protection, if you're Microsoft you must make it
explicitly clear exactly what the BSD licence applies to -- it clearly
applies to something you're shipping; and surely you can't say "this
licence applies to some code in our ftp binary, but not to the binary
as a whole, and if you want to know exactly what it applies to and
thus take advantage of this licence, you have to go find the relevant
pieces of source code for yourself; we won't help you."
The cleanest solution, it seems to me, would be to ship the pristine
BSD sources separately and make it clear, "*This* is what the BSD
licence applies to." But nobody does that, and it would be
inconvenient for embedded system developers in particular (it would
negate one usual argument for using BSD rather than Linux there). I
can't think of any other meaningful solutions; and I can't think of
any argument for saying that you can ship modified binaries under a
new licence, and not include the BSD licence in any form.
As for re-licensing under the GPL -- you'd still be obliged to put the
BSD licence in there, so it would really be dual-licensing, not
re-licensing.
Rahul
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