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Re: What license should I use when including code from subversion?

From: Ben Reser <ben_at_reser.org>
Date: 2004-03-01 21:36:27 CET

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 10:00:58AM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> That absolutely, positively is not possible to do. It's not a goal of the
> Subversion license to allow GPL code to be covered by it - that would not
> be possible with any license other than the GPL. "Compatibility with the
> GPL" entirely means software under a license that allows it to be combined
> with other GPL software, the whole of which is distributed under the GPL.

Not really. If this was true there wouldn't be any such thing as a
GPL-compatible license. GPL 2b says:

"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or
in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to
be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms
of this License."

Note the important phrasing of "under the terms of this License" as
opposed to "under this License." This permits the use of other licenses
provided that they do not have terms that conflict with the GPL.

I think your position is based on the presumption that any combination
of your code and GPL code would be automatically relicensed under the
GPL and that as long as you don't complain that there wouldn't be a
problem.

If this is true that you won't complain if there is such a combination,
why have the clause(s) in there at all that makes it GPL incompatible? Why
not simply use something like a 3 clause BSD license.

Or is it that you simply want that clause in there for the situations
where the code is relicensed under proprietary licenses? If this is a
case a dual GPL, Apache 1.1 based license may serve everyones purposes,
provided that we can get all future contributors to agree to
dual-license their works.

> Of course; but the copyright license can not be revoked. Further, if say
> Microsoft buys CollabNet and decides to sue people who've included
> Subversion code into a GPL'd program, they'd have to account for our
> past messages about the interpretation of the license as being
> GPL-compatible, and the court would look at that and likely throw their
> suit out.

Presuming that the case actually got to court. But what if the person
or persons your potential successor (I don't like using real company
names as hypothetical person, especially when the name carries a huge
load of nasty intent along with it) goes after doesn't have the
resources to defend such a claim?

If your intent is to permit GPL combinations it is far better to simply
license things in a way that permits that explicitly then rely on
estoppel to get around the issue for you.

An explicit license is hard to argue against, avoids the confusion in
the community about the issue, and gives everyone a warm fuzzy feeling.
:)

> Note that there's no particular reason, as far as CollabNet is concerned,
> to be the copyright holder on the code. We have always thought that in
> the long run, this code base (and perhaps others at tigris.org) would be
> transferred to some sort of non-profit entity that would defend it when
> necessary and act as a shield for the developers - just like the ASF.
> We've not pushed this because there's been lots of other things to worry
> about; and to do this right we'd want to start collecting Contributor
> Licensing Agreements like the ASF does, and the question of how such an
> organization is structured would need to be figured out... etc. But we'd
> like to do this at some point, and probably should do this soon.

That would be an improvement. But I think making your license do what
you really intend it to do is a far more pressing concern.

Understand, I'm not pressing you to relicense your work under the GPL or
even in a GPL-compatible way. I believe you are free to license your
work in any way you please within the framework that copyright law
provides.

-- 
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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Received on Mon Mar 1 21:35:30 2004

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