[License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John Cowan (cowan at ccil.org):

> I know of a program which consists of a fairly large library which does
> most of the work, issued under a permissive license, and a small
> interactive main program which provides the command line.  This main
> program is provided in two versions.  One works with GNU readline and is
> GPLed; the other does not provide line editing and is under the same
> permissive license as the library.  The author can do this because he is
> free to violate his own license to create the readline-free version of the
> code, but users would not be.

Will you forgive a quibble, John?  I don't mean to distract from your
overall point, which is well-taken.

The author in your hypothetical is not actually violating his/her own
licence, because he/she already had statutory rights to the work's
copyright-covered rights, and didn't need a licence to get them.  I'm
mentioning this because some people seem to think licence conditions
flow up the licensor's arm and attach to his/her brain, when in fact
they're just a property he/she can attach to a specific codebase
instance, which explains how different instances can exist with
differing licence regimes.