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License Cocktail With GPL In Doom
Rob wrote in to say: "There is an interesting news item on Doomworld about all the different licenses under which the sourceports of Doom are distributed -- at once! According to this article, some source ports use up to three different licenses, among them the GPL. So doesn't this make it GPL'd? But what about the other licenses? Do the authors have to stick to a single license and dispose of code which is covered by another license?"
...human speech is no good as input to a computer.
There are a lot of confused people out there. Let's draw some distinctions.
1) The Perl Example: Perl is distributed under two licenses, the GPL and the "Artistic License". The ENTIRETY of Perl is under BOTH of these licenses.
2) The Ghostscript) Example: Ghostscript is distributed under two licenses, the GPL (IIRC) and a commercial one. However, any given copy of ghostscript is only covered under ONE license. The newest version is commercial, all previous versions are GPL'd. So say the newest version is 10.3. If I get 10.3 from them, I have a commercial license. But if I get 10.2 from them, it is GPL'd.
3) The I Can't Think Of One Example: There are packages out there (and unfortunately I can't think of one right now) where it is released under different licenses depending on, for instance, the platform you are going to run on. So the Linux version is GPL'd but the Windows version is commercial. This is similar to the Ghostscript Example--only one license applies to each copy of the software.
Notice that none of these examples are like hypothetical software S: S is a package containing 100 source files. 50 of the source files are GPL'd, 25 of them are BSD'd and 25 of them are commercially licensed. AFAIK, the GPL doesn't allow this. My interpretation of this situation is that the 50 files would be considered a "work" and the full 100 would be a "derivative"--so the sets of 25 would have to be GPL'd as well.
All that said, what does it mean exactly, that "Doom is released under multiple licenses"?
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You can't mix GPL'd code with non-GPL'd code in the same compile and/or link. You can't even dynamically link non-GPL'd code to GPL'd code (though you can to LGPL'd). Of course, there's this whole fuzzy area about what is "mere aggregation" and what is linking, like plug-ins, pipes, and running one program in another. While there are common interpretations (pipes, running = okay, plug-ins = controversial, but probably okay), I think it's very open to argument in a court of law.
Example: a proprietary program, the binary of which contains a compressed archive of a GPL'd program binary. When run, it extracts the GPL'd binary to a temporary directory, runs it, uses the results, and then gets rid of the extracted binary.
GPL violation? I'm stumped.
A license is something that declares the rights of whoever receives the release. Thus, if some code merely sits on my harddrive, there is no concept of it being "GPL'd".
Likewise, I could release it separately under 3 different licenses. Of course, only 1 license applies to you when you download it... it's just a matter of determining which license you've selected (for example, different links, or different tarballs).
Now technically speaking, since Carmack released the Doom source code into the public domain (forgive me if I'm wrong about that), then I can take the code, burn it onto a CD, and release it under whatever license I like -- and it's perfectly legal. There aren't any "conflicting licenses", since public domain releases are (by definition) unlicensed.
I wish people would stop saying "I want you to GPL ThisSoftware", or "is that software GPL'd?". You should be saying things like "that software has been released under the GPL".
There's no violation there at all. Since Rob originally wrote the code, he gets to choose the license it's released under, and his license of choice was "GPL with an extra you-must-link-to-slashdot condition". What that line (clause 6 in the GPL) says is that if you recevied a work licensed under the GPL, then you may not add additional restrictions. That's not the case here. No one has ever received the slash code under the vanilla GPL. Interestingly, that makes the slash licence incompatible with the GPL. Mixing slash code with code licensed under the vanilla GPL would be in violation of one of the licenses (which one would depend on whether you insisted on the extra clause or not).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
A nice overview. However, it suffers from the apparently all too common misconception that the BSD license still includes the advertisement clause. It does not. The BSD license no longer includes the advertisement clause. There is no advertisement clause in the BSD license.
Please refer to ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.Li
July 22, 1999
To All Licensees, Distributors of Any Version of BSD:
As you know, certain of the Berkeley Software Distribution ("BSD") source
code files require that further distributions of products containing all or
portions of the software, acknowledge within their advertising materials
that such products contain software developed by UC Berkeley and its
contributors.
Specifically, the provision reads:
" * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
* must display the following acknowledgement:
* This product includes software developed by the University of
* California, Berkeley and its contributors."
Effective immediately, licensees and distributors are no longer required to
include the acknowledgement within advertising materials. Accordingly, the
foregoing paragraph of those BSD Unix files containing it is hereby deleted
in its entirety.
William Hoskins
Director, Office of Technology Licensing
University of California, Berkeley
Emphasis added. This means that the change is retroactive, as if the advertisement clause was never in the BSD license at all.
To reiterate, there is no advertisement clause in the BSD license.
The only way around this (that I can see) would be to convince the author of the GPL'ed to give you dispensation to release their code under a different license.
The way I see it, software licenses are like blood groups - different blood groups are incompatible and must be kept separate (or else all sorts of Bad Things happen), and the same is true for licences. To avoid trouble, it is better to make sure all code is released under the same licence. The GPL is by far the most restrictive licence ever conceived in this respect, and rather than giving people the freedom to do whatever they wish with the code, it ends up being a straightjacket to restrict their freedom. I would prefer to see more people releasing their code under the BSD license.
I've wondered before if you can GPL parts of your code, but not the entire thing. For instance, could you make all of your header files, where the actual functions live, GPL and leave the main routines in another license? You'd still be giving people what they look for, but not everything.
This is covered in the whole question of linking. What you're describing is making a GPL'ed library, and then linking it against non-GPL'ed code. In that case, any resultant work created by linking the GPL'ed libarary would have to be distributed under the GPL. This was the whole reason that RMS discourages using the LPGL for libraries (which doesn't do that), as he wants to encourage others to GPL thier code.
I agree that licenses are a pain, and you're right that probably very few people care including many of the authors. What is unfortunate about this though is that the confusion might prevent some people from distrubuting the stuff. For example printed magazines (such as Linux Format in the UK) might like to distibute a "super-duper-doom" cd on their cover but be scared away by complicated license conflicts.
This might not be a brilliant example (doom's not that big to download anyway) but my point is, that regardless of whether the users care about conflicts, businesses like the one who produce Linux Format have to be careful where licences are concerned. If this (of similar licence confusion) prevents the distribution of software in this way, it might be the users who lose out.
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The author/owner can release it under any liscense he wants, including a modified version of the GPL. The idea that you can't modify the GPL is only binding on people who don't own the copyright in question and have to use the software in a manner consistent with its liscense, although it would be a courtesy for all involved not to call it "GPL" if it's really a modified version.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
It would be great if someone was to put up a webpage containing a compability matrix on open source licenses. Pick a license from the top and one from the left; a red field means there is a collision (preferably explained below).
A quick introduction the various licenses would also be helpful ofcourse, as would tips on what to do if you have colliding licenses.
I definitely agree about the GPL being designed to accomplish a certain goal, rather than to "eliminate worry about software licensing", but I disagree about your characterization of that goal. The GPL does not only "preserve the right of all users to have the same rights as the original user". The original user had the right to use certain source code. The GPL requires that all users have the right to that same original source code, plus any modifications made to it. This is not "the same rights".
Public domain, or a Berkeley style license, preserve "the same rights". You can still, presumably, download the original code. You can't necessarily download someone else's modifications to that code, but neither could they.
Much of the propoganda around the GPL is "don't close the sources", suggesting that if something isn't GPL, one day you will look and find that it has been turned into a commercial, closed source product, with no trace of the original free version. Not very likely. Even though someone takes a program and makes their own version of it, that doesn't mean that the original is no longer available.
Well yes and no, the licenses might be conflicting. And one would expect that people checked the license.
.tgz files, and each of those files are covered by it's own license. Some, perhaps most of the content in the .tgz file, might be the same, but i doubt everything is, though perhaps the doom source with license 1, and license GPL.
.tgz and put it into any of the other dir's where you unpacked those .tgz files.
... .tgz (the creater of the patch may rerelease it, but then you would have to download the patch from his/hers site, even if the files where identical.)
...
However, the doom source with the original license
is prolly not download able from ID software any more.
The haxen is prolly something you get from Raven.
And lastly the GPL'ed doom source you can prolly download from ID software's homepage.
Granted you could prolly get all 3 from different, and perhaps even the same site.
But, you would get 3 different
I would think that only the owner of this code may repackage it under a new license. I see this as you may NOT take a file from the gpl'ed
Even if the content is the same, because the files are covered by different licenses.
So, i create a new functionality, and send out the patch under one of those 3 licenses, or under all of them if i choose to do so, or under public domain, or
However, years ago, just after the 1. source code release, someone created a patch, and neither i, you, or anyone else may put this patch into the gpl'ed doom source
Of course it might be annoying that the code is under 3 licenses, or 2, or 5, or
The solution would be to look in those patches and reimplement them under the GPL, (not sure if this is legal, but i think so)
And the developpers should then just use the GPL in the future.
And for any new projects of course.
ion++
GPL, because anything else is insuperior (though perhaps PLAN9's new license might be better, just might)