Can Java code EVER be GPLd, at all?

[Arandir]

On Sun, 14 Nov 1999, David Starner wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 14, 1999 at 08:56:50PM -0800, Arandir wrote:
> > > >But in the land of
> > > > the Free, you are not free to write BSD applications that link to GPL libraries.
> > > Right, providing we're talking the BSD license versus the XFree86 license.
> > 
> > Wrong. The MIT (X) license does not give you the right to change the license.
> 
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
> this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
> the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
> use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies
>                                                ^^^^^^^^^^
> of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do
> so, subject to the following conditions:

I think you are misdefining "sublicense". To sublicense means to be able to
pass the license on to someone else, similarly to subleasing or subletting.
Normally, only the copyright holder has the right to license his work to
others. This is normal for proprietary software where you can't pass on your
license to someone else to use. By adding this clause, the MIT license allows
you to redistribute the software with exactly the same rights that you got.

Take a look at the "following conditions":

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

You have to give the give the same permissions to those you distribute it to.
Just like the GPL, you are not allowed to make it less free!

So where did this notion that you can take MIT code proprietary come from?
Probably from a misunderstanding. You are allowed to make modifications to MIT
code, and you can license those modifications however you want. But the
original software itself may not have its license changed. If you look through
GPL'd packages' source code, you occasionally find individual files under a BSD
or MIT license even though the package as a whole is under the GPL. You still
have the right to take those files and redistribute them under the MIT clauses.
The GPL allows this because the MIT license does not add any restrictions beyond
the GPL restrictions.

But if you use any GPL code, then the entire package must be under the GPL.
Thus, if you statically link a MIT application to a GPL library, you are
required to distribute the whole under the GPL. But the MIT license does not
allow this. (a dual MIT-GPL licensed package might be possible, however)

This may sound like nitpicking (it probably is), but the big difference is that
the former is GPL code derived from MIT code, but anything derived from GPL
code must be licensed under the GPL.

-- 
Arandir...
_______________________________
<http://www.meer.net/~arandir/>