On Di, 2010-03-16 at 10:57 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
On 03/16/2010 07:11 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus <stefan(a)seekline.net> wrote:
>
>> The licensing list [1] states that the license "BSD with advertising"
is
>> not compatible with GPLv2/v3. But what means compatible? For example, I
>> would like to use/create a package for a library which is released as
>> "BSD with advertising". Consider an application licensed as GPLv2
which
>> uses the shared library. Is this allowed? In this case the library would
>> be licensed as "BSD with advertising" and the application which uses
>> that library as GPLv2. If I remember right, then there was some kind of
>> clause in the GPLv2/v3 license which said that even linking against such
>> a library is not allowed but I'm really not sure. Maybe my mind plays
>> tricks with me ;-)
>
> The GPLv2 permits to link against any independently developed library (which
> therefore is an independend work) regardless of the license of the library.
Stefan,
Please note that Mr. Schilling does not speak in any way for the Fedora
Project, and his... unique... license interpretations are not correct
for Fedora.
There is a linking incompatibility between a library with a license of
"BSD with advertising" and a binary with a license of "GPLv2" (or
v3,
for that matter). You should double check that the license on that
library is actually BSD with advertising (if the copyright holder is the
Regents of the University of California, the advertising clause has been
dropped).
This was exactly the same I had in mind. I just wasn't sure because I
heard the same when I attended a conference presentation but didn't get
anything written down. So I was unsure.
If you can let me know which library is in use, I would be
happy to look into this for you.
The library I'm talking about is OpenDKIM (actually it's kind of a
daemon and a library, but I want to use the library from GPLv2 code)
which uses at the moment a 4-clause-BSD license:
http://www.opendkim.org/license.html
A confirmation if it is really a BSD-with-advertisement license is very
welcomed.
If it is actually BSD with advertising, I would ask the upstream if
they
would be willing to drop the advertising clause, as they may be unaware
of the problems it causes. If they are not, the alternative would be for
the copyright holder of the GPLv2'd code to add an explicit exception to
permit this scenario, and we could propose some suggested exception text
to them.
I already contacted upstream and now I'm waiting for their response. I
also would like to package OpenDKIM for Fedora but I think as long as
upstream uses BSD-with-advertising it does not make much sense. It would
hurt Fedora more than help, I guess.
Thanks for your message,
Stefan