Date: Sat, 06 Apr 2002 04:05:53 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: Ian Pulsford <ianjp@optusnet.com.au>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Abuses of the BSD license? Message-ID: <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>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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". This was the main reason the USL people stripped the BSD license notices off the files in SVR4, including the header files, which they then labelled as unpublished proprietary works (courts have since decided that labelling them that way doean't make them unpublished, unless their distribution was limited to a "select group"). > > > (b) You are not compelled to redistribute the source code. (If you > > > were, it would be a "viral" license like the GPL.) > > > > No, but you are required to duplicate the notice in accompanying > > documentation. > > > > Whether this grants people the right to distribute the binaries > > of the code you distribute is questionable. > > Again, IANAL, but you seem to be questioning the most fundamental > assumptions people make about BSD licensing. (Is it questionable that > an embedded systems developer can distribute devices containing > FreeBSD binaries without supplying the source code?) No. That' not questionable at all. You can't demand source code. The only thing that's questionable is whether or not they can prohibit redistribution of binaries that are made up *solely* of BSD code, under the terms permitting binary distribution in the license. IMO, if te binaries contain proprietary code, then the answer is "no", and if they don't, "who cares? They can recreate them by obtaining the sources from another location anyway". I think that a court would hold that such redistribution was not legal, on the basis of the work converting the source to binary, but it could go either way, really (by reproducing the notice, do you grant the same rights to the binary, when all they have is the binary? Is that an inclusive or exclusive "or"? 8-)). In general, you really don't care about anything but your intellectual property, anyway. If you worry about things which are not strategic, good: my company will beat up your company, because your company lacks focus on the important parts of its business, and is off in the weeds chasing UFOs. Distributing only binaries of pure BSD licensed code is a matter of practicality. People don't "withold source" to the unmodified BSD licensed part of the code because they are trying to treat it as proprietary, they simply don't publish it because it would be more expensive to do so, rather than less expensive or equally expensive. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3CAEE4A1.315CF53>