For Approval: German Free Software License

[Chuck Swiger]

On Nov 29, 2004, at 12:15 AM, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> Michael Sparks dixit:
> 2) There is no "the BSD licence", and it's author-specific, so
>    such a clause would be nonsense anyway.

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/license.html
http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html
http://www.netbsd.org/Goals/redistribution.html
http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html

>> This retroactively
>> affects every external project that uses the code.
>
> It's common sense that you cannot retroactively take back rights
> granted under a published licence until the licence explicitly
> states that.

Since the GFSL does explicitly state such a thing in section 9(2), you 
have identified the problem precisely.

>> (Consider a whizzy new
>> scheduler released under the GFSL which gets integrated into the linux
>> kernel, the GFSL changes - the scheduler has to be removed - from all
>
> No, since upon entering the Linux kernel it's automatically GPL'd.

This is obviously wrong.

GPL'ed kernel code submitted to the BSD projects remains under the GPL; 
and any BSD-licensed code which might be adopted by Linux remains under 
the BSD license.  The BSD projects are willing to include GPL'ed 
software as an optional part of their operating systems as part of a 
compilation; they are not willing to adopt GPL'ed code into the kernel 
if such code would be required by the kernel to function.

Some of the links I provided above contain a more detailed discussion 
of this matter.

-- 
-Chuck