combining software under different licenses

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Larry,

On Sat, 2009-08-29 at 07:19 -0700, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
> This says nothing about combinations that third parties can make by
> themselves, which can be done by any user who wants to. It also says
> nothing about the ability of a GPL distributor (GPLv3 only, according
> to FSF) to include Apache code in that software and link to it, as
> long as the resulting combination is under GPL.
> 
> Please let me know if you think I'm analyzing this license
> compatibility problem incorrectly. I'd personally like nothing better
> than to encourage ASF to be free to combine GPL and Apache software
> (through linking, of course) without "infecting" the Apache code. 

I see what you mean now. So this is really about political issues, where
some group excludes code distributed under some open source licenses
that others offer their code under. I was confused because you made it
sound like it was a legal issue or some incompatibility between
licenses, but it is about differences in intend. I think you analyzed
the political issue correctly. I liked the way John Cowan put it
"generous givers cannot freely give away what is provided to them by
generous sharers"

For your "infecting" issue ("accepting reciprocity" might be a better,
more neutral, description), I think the SFLC paper I pointed to in my
last message does nicely explain where the boundaries are and how to do
the bookkeeping correctly so others know the intentions of the various
authors.
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html

And of course it never hurts to just ask the original authors explaining
why certain forms of derivative works based on combined code bases might
benefit the larger community as long at the end result is distributed
under some mix of OSI certified licenses. Sometimes hackers are willing
to "downgrade" to LGPL or add an exception to the GPL that allows
certain forms of creating derivative works through linking as long as
the end user receives all rights they would normally have under the GPL.

Cheers,

Mark