On Apr 5, 2013, at 3:14 PM, Robin Winning wrote:
> I am a contracts manager at software company, and in addition to doing
> contracts, I now find myself reviewing the licenses associated with the open
> source packages my company has acquired. I have become quite familiar with
> the GPL/LGPL/AGPL suite of licenses, as well as the other, permissive
> licenses: MIT, BSD, etc. Here's my question: quite frequently, the programmer
> makes the Free Software Foundation the copyright holder, but then attaches a
> license that is not in the GPL family. Is that a valid combination?
Certainly. There was a time (before SourceForge, CollabNet, github, Perl's
CPAN, etc) when the FSF used to host BSD/MIT-ish licensed software like
ncurses, less, gzip, and others.
Many of them eventually were dual-licensed under the GPL.
> In the case of "ncurses," I was able to research and determine that when they
> assigned their copyright to the Free Software Foundation, the FSF gave
> ncurses a special carve-out allowing them to use a permissive license.
> However, all the rest of the open source packages I have come across that
> assert "Copyright Free Software Foundation" but are accompanied by non-GPL
> licenses do not seem to have that sort of special arrangement.
>From "man less":
less is part of the GNU project and is free software. You can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either (1) the GNU
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; or
(2) the Less License. See the file README in the less distribu-
tion for more details regarding redistribution. You should have
received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the source
for less; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
You should also have received a copy of the Less License; see the file
LICENSE.
> Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems contradictory to me, and I don't
> know how to characterize the license in terms of permissive or restrictive.
Something which is dual-licensed under the GPL and a permissive BSD/MIT-style
license is permissive.
Regards,
--
-Chuck
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