License Approval Process

[Derek J. Balling]

Dual licensing makes perfect sense, it all depends on why you are licensing 
your software.

I believe there's a discussion somewhere online as to the "whys and 
wherefores" that Larry Wall chose to license Perl (for example) under 
multiple licenses. (Where to find it is left as an exercise to the reader 
because in my quick search I could not locate it after 2 minutes). :)

D


At 10:56 AM 2/15/00 -0800, Brice, Richard wrote:
>Dual licensing doesn't make sense. If a licensee can choose which license to
>use, the will chose the one to their advantage. The software we are
>producing is used for the design of highway bridge structures. Our lawyer
>though the GPL didn't provide us enough protection against tort claims from
>third parties. If someone had the choice of GPL and Alternate Route, and
>they wanted to sue us, they would choose GPL. So what good is the dual
>license? None.
>
>         -----Original Message-----
>         From:   Michael Stutz [SMTP:stutz at dsl.org]
>         Sent:   Tuesday, February 15, 2000 10:49 AM
>         To:     'license-discuss at opensource.org'
>         Subject:        Re: License Approval Process
>
>         Richard Brice wrote:
>
>         > You can't use source code licensed with License X with source code
>         > licensed with License Z (ok, that's a generalization but I don't
>         > think it is too far off the mark).
>
>         Is it *possible* for a license to be compatible with another?
>Offhand
>         I can think of just two possibilities for the GPL: the LGPL, and
>code
>         that has no license and is in the public domain.
>
>         Might dual-licensing apply for some of the organizations who are
>         toying with writing a GPL clone -- as copyright holder, couldn't
>they
>         release their code under both the GPL (or whatever license they
>         chose), and also license the program under some other terms as
>needed?
>
>         [Can anyone point me to any resources on the issue of license
>         compatibility?]
>
>
>         > We support all of the concepts of in the GPL, however the
>         > disclaimers and "lack of warranty" statements aren't specific
>enough
>         > (at least that is what the lawyer told me).
>
>         Did the lawyer mean that it was not specific enough about your
>         particular organization or software, or that it was not specific
>         enough about exactly what is being disclaimed? If the latter, I'd
>like
>         to hear what the lawyer had to say!