[License-discuss] Option to fall back from GPL to ASL

[Kevin Fleming]

Also, in this situation, the copyright holders of BAR (and thus the
licensors) are the parties that would have standing to pursue any action
against a distributor who distributes a derivative work of BAR without
following the terms of its license (the GPL, or a commercial license). If
someone has licensed BAR under a commercial license, and then wants to
distribute BAR with FOO under non-GPL terms, the licensors of BAR would
presumably not attempt to enforce the GPL's terms, since they know they
have granted a commercial license. This assumes that the commercial license
even allows distribution of BAR; it probably does not. In that case, there
is no distribution, only 'use', and as David Woolley said, users are free
to combine works in any way they wish for their own use, regardless of the
open source licenses on those works.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 2:57 AM, David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk>
wrote:

> On 25/08/15 22:26, Richard Eckart de Castilho wrote:
>
>> The vendors of BAR also offer a commercial license for BAR. If somebody
>> buys that license, we want them to be able to use FOO under the
>> commercial-friendly ASL terms without having to give them any extra
>> permission. Right now, those people would still face the GPL label on FOO
>> even though they removed it for themselves from BAR by buying a license.
>>
>
> This only becomes an issue if they want to redistribute the code linked
> against BAR, or want to redistribute a version of the code that only works
> with BAR.  The GPL does not restrict modification or linking within an
> organisation.  It's intent is only to ensure that when it is passed to a
> third party they can modify and rebuild it without being forced to pay for
> other licences and without being dependent on code that they are unable to
> see or modify.
>
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