[License-discuss] a GPLv3 compatible attribution for MIT/BSD?

[Johannes Buchner]

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On 01/14/12 14:58, Clark C. Evans wrote:
> Good Morning!
> 
> Our company is releasing a medical informatics platform, RexDB, 
> under the GPLv3 license later this year (after the code has a 
> developer documentation).  We will be using 7b clause of the GPLv3
> license for a reasonable author attribution.
> 
> Even so, parts of our system will be released under a more 
> permissive license, and I'm wondering if there is a simple, 
> MIT-style clause that would be compatible with the GPLv3?

IANAL, but consider these points:

 - "GPL compatible" are licenses that allow relicensing of the work
with GPL. So they are a strict subset of GPL in a way.

 - MIT/BSD allows relicensing to pretty much any other open-source
license.

 - The original BSD license (with advertising clause) has not been OSI
approved.

 - The original BSD license (with advertising clause) is not GPL
compatible. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq#OrigBSD

As far as I read 7b, it's about comments like
/* (C) John Doe, 2007
 * This copyright notice must be preserved ...
 */

It talks about preserving the preservation of legal notices or
author attributions, not rules of any ad formats for the software.
c-d also only limit the misrepresentation (much like BSD), but does
not prevent anyone from not giving you attribution in marketing
material --
*The only thing you demand is that they distribute the source, and
that the source must (forever) contain your name.*
BSD/MIT licenses do demand that too.

Cheers,
Johannes
> 
> Here's my crayon attempt...
> 
> To the extent that an application using this software displays
> legal notices, copyrights, or attributions it must acknowledge the
> Example Project (http://example.org) in a similar manner.
> 
> Would this sort of clause be compatible with GPLv3 and would it
> meet the OSI criteria?  Would anyone have specific wording 
> suggestions?  I'm asking here because I'd rather re-use something
> similar, if not, then I'd prefer to be adding a clause that has
> "consensus" here.
> 
> Thank you kindly.
> 
> Clark _______________________________________________ 
> License-discuss mailing list License-discuss at opensource.org 
> http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
>
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