BSD License????

[Jimen Ching]

On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Warren Togami wrote:
>The BSD license without the advertising clause is considered "GPL
>compatible" and approved by OSI, but the copyright owner of the code must
>relicense it under a different license in order to make a GPL release.

That is not my understanding of distribution licenses.  The BSD license
explicitly grants you the right to change the license.  But it also
explicitly require the copyright notice to be intact; probably to make
sure the recipient knows who the original authors were.

What this means is that you can take a BSD licensed software and make it
proprietary.  That is one of the main arguments BSD'ers have against GPL
software.  GPL does not allow this.

Of course, relicensing is not the issue here.  The issue is porting of a
BSD kernel software into a GPL kernel software.  In other words, combining
BSD and GPL source code.  This is only possible if the two licenses grant
the same rights _AND_ does not prevent the other license from imposing
certain restrictions.

Basically, it is possible to release a software under a dual license.
This is done all of the time.  The trick is, the licenses must _NOT_ be
mutually exclusive.

--jc
--
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org