Hello! On Sat, Sep 01, 2007 at 12:54:38AM -0400, David H. Lynch Jr. wrote: >[...]
> BSD Licensed code has found its way into proprietary products, with >no availability of source - Which is exactly one characteristic of BSD vs. GPL, that BSD doesn't require you to distribute source should you chose to distribute binaries (as permitted by the BSD license). >[...] > BUT I am having a hard time convincing myself that taking BSD/ISC >Licensed code - and relicensing it while preservng the > copyright notice, violates the BSD/ISC License. > Whether it is honest or not, it still seems to conform to my >understanding of both the spirit and the letter of the license. > BSD advocates claim their license is more free because it allows you >to do most anything with BSD code. > Am I missing the part where that freedom includes removing the >license ? IMO it's by copyright law itself. Relicensing/sublicensing is by default a reserved right, so it has to be explicitly granted in a license if licensees should be allowed to relicense/sublicense. That explicit grant is *not* present in the BSD/ISC licenses I've looked at in this moment. The BSD/ISC licenses grant the rights (that are reserved by copyright law) to use, (re)distribute and modify the work itself, and *those* rights are bound by only few conditions (fewer than the GPL imposes). Of course, you may make a derived/combined work where your own contribution is of a different license. But the original part of the work remains BSD/ISC licensed. The combined work is only usable when a licensee can fulfill the conditions of *both* licenses in order to be granted the rights granted by *both* licenses. > How is what Linux developers seem to be doing less legal or ethical >that what many commercial developers have already done ? > If this is not one of the freedom's of BSD Licensed code, then >craft your license to prohibit it. As said, IMO and as far as I understand, it's not a matter of the licenses themselves, but of copyright law itself. It's a matter that the licenses (both BSD/ISC *and* GPL) have no clauses permitting re/sublicensing. >[...] Kind regards, Hannah.
