GUI server tools?

[Christopher Vance]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 02:25:41PM +0800, John wrote:
>As I understand BSD licences it's generally okay to incorporate BSD code 
>into GPL code. A BSD licence is not "viral."

Uh, only the author gets to choose the licensing.  Not the modifier,
adopter, or user.  If you mix BSD stuff and GPL stuff, which is fine
by the BSD license, the BSD license still applies to the BSD files,
whether they were modified or not.

>Not the other way though.

Indeed.  The GPL imposes conditions on the result of mixing BSD code
with it, but the BSD code politely imposes none on the GPL code.  Is
your freedom a matter of beer or speech?  Is it the person or the code
that's free?

What this means is:

1) person A writes code A and releases under BSD license;

2) person B writes code B and releases under GPL;

3) person C (or B) takes stuff from code A and code B to make code C,
and releases under GPL;

4) person D has every right to take code A files from code C, and
follow BSD, whether or not person C made any modifications to those
files; but if person D takes any files from code C which were not
originally code A, then those files are still GPL.

Note that the order of 1 & 2, and the proportions of each in 3 makes
no difference to 4.

If person C doesn't want his modifications to code A to be BSD, s/he
will have to replace the code A entirely with an independent
reimplementation, not just modify the existing code A.  Person C can't
impose conditions on those bits of the code s/he didn't write.  (I
guess the modifications could be provided in the form of original BSD
code A plus GPL patches.)

Similar issues arise in code which is mixed GPL / LGPL - it's
perfectly reasonable to take the LGPL parts out of a GPL collection,
and treat the result as LGPL, since the person incorporating the LGPL
stuff into a GPL collection doesn't have the right to remove freedoms
already granted by the LGPL.

-- 
Christopher Vance