On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 07:06:41PM +0100, Pavel Sanda wrote: > Angus Leeming wrote: > > We had one curmudgeonly gentleman, John Weiss, who point blank refused to > > licence his contribution to LyX under the GPL version 2 or later. The old > > flavour of this page has him down as licencing his contributions under the > > artistic licence. > > btw http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html says Artistic License > is not compatible with GPL. what does it mean wrt lyx sources themselves? > do we need to ask for Artistic license 2? > > pavel
The Artistic License is more permissive than the GPL. As most people read the GPL, if you copy-n-paste even __one__ __line__ of code from GPL source to any other file, that other file automatically becomes subjec to the GPL. As per my reading of paragraph #7 of the Artistic License, the only requirements for code-reuse are (a) your "reuse" does not constitute wholesale copying of the entire source with a 2-line tweak, but are only reusing chunks; and (b) you clearly label where you got the copied chunks from. The upshot is: you cannot put a GPL'd file into a codebase under the Artistic License without changing the license of the entire codebase to GPL. You can, however, put an Artistic License into a GPL'd codebase with no effect on the other files in the codebase (which remains under the GPL). -- John Weiss
