Academic Free License questions

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Fri Nov 22 04:36:48 UTC 2002


On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 11:29:14PM -0400, Bruce Dodson wrote:
> Or, if you don't want to license under GPL, you could dual-license under
> another GPL-compatible license.  Dual licensing always confuses me though:
> which set of rights am I using?  That determines which set of requirements
> will apply.
>

My understanding is that dual licensing means the person accepting the
license chooses which license they want to accept. So someone can take
the code from you under the AFL, or the ZPL, as they like.
 
> Suppose I have a piece of software which is licensed under the user's choice
> between AFL and a tweaked ZPL 2.  The Zope licese is GPL-compatible, and
> obviously if someone sues me with an allegation that the software breaks
> your patent, they can keep using my software by virtue of the rights granted
> in the Zope license.  But, having made that allegation, are they entitled to
> use other software which is published solely under AFL / OSL?

So the way I would understand this is that if they chose to use the
software under the ZPL, the patent clause would not apply to them.

However they would have to be consistent. If they said they were
accepting the ZPL, then they would have to comply with all its terms,
they could not claim ZPL today and AFL tomorrow.

But I could be wrong.

Havoc

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