On Tuesday 13 January 2009 02:43:36 John Weiss wrote: > 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).
Just to play safe which of the variants of the artistic license do you apply to your contributions? Artistic version 1 http://www.perl.com/pub/a/language/misc/Artistic.html Artistic version 2 http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0 Fedora has an explicit rule to exclude packages licensed with Artistic license 1.0 due to the same problems pointed by FSF. -- José Abílio
