BSD and MIT license "compliance" with the MS-PL

Philippe Verdy verdy_p at wanadoo.fr
Sun Apr 19 01:07:29 UTC 2009


Matthew Flaschen [mailto:matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu] wrote:
> I never said FooBar is free.  MS-PL and thus Foo are free, 
> but not copyleft.  FooBar is not free, which is why MS-PL is 
> not copyleft.

Youi are contradicting your self here: if you say that MS-PL and thus Foo
are free, they MUST provide the sources on request not only for it, but also
for all derivatives. As you have defined FooBar as a derivative of Foo, when
you say that Foo is Free, FooBar MUST also be free. If not, the FooBar's
editor is in violation of the licence he got from A for Foo.

Free licences not only cover the initial softwares, but also their
derivatives.

Note: I don"t make any distinction here between free and copyleft, because
you have yourself said that "free" was meant in the definition from the FSF,
where it also means copyleft, unless there's an explicit restriction (like
the one in the LGPL) clause to the generic FSF's copyleft requirements
(found in the GPL). But the copyleft licences does not allow derivatives to
add such clauses. If there's no such clause from the start, you can't add
it.
And in all FSF licences, the copyleft requirements cannot be removed even
from the derivative works. And the clauses need to be written in such a way
that any downstream user can remove it on its own redistributions to return
to the unmodified copyleft licence, without violating it (so this clause
must not be "viral" like the rest of the unmodified copylet licence, each
user can choose to use it or not and to redistribute it itself)





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