When to evaluate dual licenses (was: license categories, was: I'm not supposed to use the ECL v2?)

[Wilson, Andrew]

Ben Tilly wrote: 

> That is indeed where we part ways.  Because my understanding says
> copyright is between the copyright owner and recipient.  And a
> copyright license is permission from the copyright holder to the
> recipient.  The distributer is irrelevant.  (Unless there are special
> contracts involved, which there aren't in the case of the GPL.)

This is indeed the crux of the argument.  For GPL licenses with
additional permissions, or indeed for the general case of dual
licensing, the distributor is far from irrelevant.  The
distributor may remove permissions.  The distributor may choose
which license of the two granted by the original developer applies
to code as-distributed.  In fact, there are situations where a
distributor *must* choose which license applies, and I believe
you trigger such a situation in the scenario under discussion
(when you want to release modifications to V2-or-later base
code under V3, you must choose V3).

Anyone with a fresh angle on this discussion, please weigh in.

Cheers

Andy Wilson
Intel open source technology center