Re: PepperfishProfiler

[Jamie Webb <j@...>]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 11:39:37AM -0500, Virgil Smith wrote:
> > That's exactly what I meant. People (maybe) cannot
> > include your code and distribute the result as GPL
> > (or anything else). It has to be 'GPL plus a little
> > bit under the Pepperfish License'. It seems like
> > it's just making obstacles for the sake of it.
> ...
> > You've already got your assurances that your copyright
> > notices will be retained, and you know that your
> > source is going to remain free anyway (someone GPLing
> > a particular instance of it has no effect on the
> > original), so what is there to gain with this
> > restriction?
> 
> This statement is simply naive.  You cannot "GPLing a particular instance".
> Copyright refers to the material itself, not to a particular "printing",
> i.e. instance.  Unless there is a 100% match between the license for a
> section and "the" license for the whole their will in fact be a "plus a
> little bit under..." situation.  The restrictions on the whole is the union
> of the restrictions placed on the components.

Licenses such as BSD and MIT permit you to sublicense code. This
does indeed allow you to effectively 'GPL an instance': you may
sublicense the code that you recieved as MIT to convert it to GPL, and
this is what Daniel is objecting to allowing.

Copyright does refer to the material itself, but the same material can
be available under multiple licenses. You are confusing the two: if
you combine work copyrighted by two different people, then the
resulting work is copyrighted by both, but if the license is the same
(or one allows subsumption by the other), then the resulting work can
have a single license.

> Of course the only sure path for the author of a Lua tool to simplify its
> usage from a licensing standpoint is to sell the copyright to Tecgraph and
> have them stamp the Lua license on it.  This would ensure that the component
> contributed nothing to the "union".  Of course, even this might fail if the
> "union" in question does not "include" Lua itself, but just code written in
> Lua.

Not at all. Since the Lua license is just the MIT license, any code
licensed under the MIT license (or anything more permissive, e.g.
public domain) may be used in exactly the same places as Lua itself.
The relevant copyright notices are required of course, but each
author's copyright needs to appear only against his own code.

The Lua authors have asserted that they would like their copyright to
appear in about boxes or similar, but that is not actually a
requirement of the license. No GPL-compatible license requires
this, for exactly the reason that the combined licenses gradually
stack up until you have something unworkable.

-- Jamie Webb