On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 04:38:21PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Alice wrote foo.c, licensed under the GNU X11 license.
I've never seen a GNU X11 license, nor is one listed at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/license-list.html. > Bob wrote bar.c, licensed under the GNU GPL. > > Carol writes baz.c, and builds /usr/bin/baz by statically linking each of > foo.o, bar.o, and baz.o. This time, Carol has to abide by both the > GPL and the "X11" license. To avoid discussion of the fair use issue, I'll assume that carol is distributing /usr/bin/baz to millions of people. > The GPL says she "must cause [the work] to be licensed as a > whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this > license". That would be the source tree for /usr/bin/baz (and, thus, builds of /usr/bin/baz). > That doesn't require her to license baz.c like that, but it does > require her to license /usr/bin/baz like that. Essentially, yes. > As this is a derived work based on foo.c, the question > is, can she do this? And, if not, what clause of the grant of copyright on foo.c is she violating? > Bob did last time and misrepresenting her ability to sublicense > works based on foo.c and infringing on Alice's copyright, or > she's not abiding by the terms of the GPL (ie, not licensing the > work as a whole in the proper way), and thus infringing on Bob's > copyright. This sentence doesn't make grammatical sense. * * * * * > In particular, AIUI, rms and the FSF believe the last clause from the > OpenSSL license makes that license GPL incompatible. To quote Aaron > Lehmann (giving advice from an unnamed friend) from a few weeks ago on > this list: > > ] * The licence and distribution terms for any publically available > ] * version or derivative of this code cannot be changed. i.e. this > ] * code cannot simply be copied and put under another distribution > ] * licence [including the GNU Public Licence.] That idea is probably based on the legal idea that there must be some legally valid purpose to all language in a legal document. And, it its possible to read that sentence as if OpenSSL can't be published in any work with a derivative copyright (unless that derivative copyright license is OpenSSL's). Thanks, -- Raul
