On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: > It is true that Debian's license to the original works persists. > But we won't have a license to the derivative work, because the > upstream author didn't have the right to prepare that work, much > less license it.
Assuming the upstream author has properly licensed upstream's contributions under the GPL, we can distribute those contributions so long as we comply with the terms of the GPL. [There is an argument that the upstream author can't actually distribute upstream's contributions under the GPL, but I'd suggest that even if this is the case, if we can comply with the GPL, we should be able to distribute it ourselves.] The other licenses that are granted under GPL ยง6 come directly from the original licensor, not via the intermediate(s) (in this case, upstream.) Thus, we have valid GPL licenses for all parts of the derivative work. That the original author has lost his license to prepare a derivative work is immaterial to us, because we retain it. This assumes that the windows version of xchat is a separate derived work from the version of xchat that we are distributing, of course. Don Armstrong -- <Clint> why the hell does kernel-source-2.6.3 depend on xfree86-common? <infinity> It... Doesn't? <Clint> good point http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
