GUI server tools?

[Christopher Vance]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 03:40:46PM +0800, John wrote:
>>I meant that people can copy the BSD bits out of your GPL product, and
>>do whatever the BSD licence permits.  That includes modifying and
>>distributing it without the requirement to make source available.  Of
>>course, they can't do that to your original GPL bits.
>
>That's probably not true actually, since under the BSD licence I have no
>obligation to give your the source at all. If I do so, I expect I can do
>so on terms of my choosing provided that I comply with the BSD requirements.

It's true that the BSD licence doesn't require you to share your
source changes.  But if you choose to use GPL stuff in your product,
which you didn't write yourself, the GPL in that part probably
requires you to make all the source available, so that I can further
modify and recompile your product.  Technicalities about linkage and
what constitures a derived work may enable argument about which bits
are covered and which aren't, but you won't win friends that way, even
if legally correct.

>Remember that the GPL is a licence. It's reinforced by copyright, and
>the GPL requires me (as a second user) to grant you the same rights as I
>hold and the copyright owner has the right to enforce that. The
>originator of BSD-licenced software doesn't care whether I give you the
>source or not, whether you have it or not.

Of course.  But so is the BSD licence, even if it doesn't call itself
one - it allows use of the code without contract, but only if you meet
specified conditions.  Older BSD licences had conditions not found in
GPL (like the defunct advertising clause), while GPL has conditions
not found in BSD licences.  But both are licences, both are based in
copyright, and one is much easier to understand than the other.  ;-)

>Note too that I do not believe I have any obgligaton to give (in any
>sense) your for software I've not licenced to you under the GPL. For
>example, Red Hat distributes, as part of RHEL, Gnu libc. As I understand
>the GPL, if you don't have a valid licence to RHEL then you are not
>entitled to the source code.

Indeed.

But if I've obtained your GPL product from you or your distributor,
the GPL entitles me to ask for the whole source so that I can rebuild
it.  I understand this normally to include your BSD licenced
modifications.  The BSD author's licence then lets me redistribute
your derivative BSD work.  Neither your software licence, nor the GPL,
can exclude this right because you don't own that part of the
software, and it wasn't placed under GPL by the original licensor.

As you said yourself "If you don't agree to my terms, get your
software from elsewhere because mine is available on no other terms."
That means you have to decide whether to use the BSD stuff on *its*
terms, or replace it with similar stuff written from scratch under
GPL.

Just as some pro-GPL people have taken BSD stuff and rewritten it, I
note that some GPL stuff has been rewritten by pro-BSD people.
Freedom comes in a variety of flavours.

>Nonetheless Red Hat does make its source code publicly available. I can,
>and some folk have done it, download the entire source code to RHEL and
>build it myself.
>
>And sell it once I've sanitised it wrt trademarks.

I think we can agree that licencing is complex, especially if you mix
stuff from several licences, or from several authors.  You have to
meet the requirements set by all the bits you choose to get from
outside your own brain.  And sometimes even the stuff inside doesn't
belong to you, because of patents.  :-(

At the moment I'm doing some stuff under GPL, because it's derivative
of other GPL stuff, and I'm writing some original stuff (totally
unrelated) under a BSD-like license.  It's the original author's
choice.

-- 
Christopher Vance