License Approval Process

[Brice, Richard]

Dual licensing doesn't make sense. If a licensee can choose which license to
use, the will chose the one to their advantage. The software we are
producing is used for the design of highway bridge structures. Our lawyer
though the GPL didn't provide us enough protection against tort claims from
third parties. If someone had the choice of GPL and Alternate Route, and
they wanted to sue us, they would choose GPL. So what good is the dual
license? None.

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Michael Stutz [SMTP:stutz at dsl.org]
	Sent:	Tuesday, February 15, 2000 10:49 AM
	To:	'license-discuss at opensource.org'
	Subject:	Re: License Approval Process 

	Richard Brice wrote:

	> You can't use source code licensed with License X with source code
	> licensed with License Z (ok, that's a generalization but I don't
	> think it is too far off the mark).

	Is it *possible* for a license to be compatible with another?
Offhand
	I can think of just two possibilities for the GPL: the LGPL, and
code
	that has no license and is in the public domain.

	Might dual-licensing apply for some of the organizations who are
	toying with writing a GPL clone -- as copyright holder, couldn't
they
	release their code under both the GPL (or whatever license they
	chose), and also license the program under some other terms as
needed?

	[Can anyone point me to any resources on the issue of license
	compatibility?]


	> We support all of the concepts of in the GPL, however the
	> disclaimers and "lack of warranty" statements aren't specific
enough
	> (at least that is what the lawyer told me).

	Did the lawyer mean that it was not specific enough about your
	particular organization or software, or that it was not specific
	enough about exactly what is being disclaimed? If the latter, I'd
like
	to hear what the lawyer had to say!