Meld's Bazaar support

[Robert Collins]

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 13:51 -0500, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> 
> > That doesn't require distributing GPL'd code, it just calls into
> > bzrlib (GPL'd) from meld (2-c BSD'd), which is fine AFAICT.  So, I
> > don't see the licensing issue.  What am I missing?
> 
> That isn't legal.

Huh? Its perfectly legal to call a GPL library from a BSD program. You
lose your licence to *distribute or copy* the GPL library, when you do
that - the GPL is a distribution licence, not a use licence.

For C programs, this is rather fatal, because shipping a usable binary
means shipping the binary of the GPL library, and the text included in
your binary by the compilation process.

For python, the analogous thing is the .pyc or .pyo - which people do
not ship anyway. 

So its completely fine for meld.vc.bzr to be BSD and call into bzr. Its
not fine if someone decides to ship meld/vc/bzr.py.

> What is legal is redistributing BSD-2c code as GPL, and then bundling
> *that* with GPL code.

No, thats illegal - its changing the licence on the BSD code. You are
able to aggregate the BSD code into a GPL product, but it stays BSD
licenced.

> GPL doesn't say it is allowed to be called by BSD-2c. BSD-2c says it
> can
> be upgraded into GPL and rereleased without having to go back to the
> original authors. 

GPL cant say anything about how it can be called, only about how it can
be distributed.

-Rob

-- 
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