On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 09:58:16AM -0600, kfogel@collab.net wrote:
> Peter Lamberg <subv@lodju.dyndns.org> writes:
> > C) Just include the code, mention it nicely and as required by
> > Subversion licese and hope for the best.
>
> If it were me, I would choose (C). Here's why:
>
> Of the two licenses, the GPL is "stricter". (It's not always the case
> that licences can be ordered according to strictness, but in this case
> they mostly can.) Therefore, if there's going to be an
> incompatibility, the copyright holder for the GPL'd code would have
> the reason to complain. However, *you* are the copyright holder!
> Therefore, if you do not have a problem, who else would have legal
> standing to complain? No one :-). Just make sure you continue to be
> the copyright holder.
The standard awkwardness here is that people redistributing Peter's code
won't by default have permission to pass on this restriction: the GPL,
as received by redistributors, forbids additional restrictions like the
requirement for the advertising clause, and we don't have the right to
require people to whom we're distributing the code to do that. This has
come up many times with other projects.
This can be resolved by Peter including an explicit permission statement
in addition to the GPL, saying essentially "GPL with the proviso that it
may be combined with code under the Subversion licence". This does of
course rely on you never using any other GPLed code, so it can be
awkward.
(I'm assuming that the GPL and the Subversion licence are incompatible;
I haven't checked.)
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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Received on Wed Feb 25 19:09:10 2004