Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus <stefan(a)seekline.net&gt; 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.

On 03/16/2010 07:11 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote: > Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus <stefan(a)seekline.net&gt; 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).

If you can let me know which library is in use, I would be happy to look into this for you.

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.

>>>>> "SSF" == Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus <stefan(a)seekline.net&gt; writes: SSF> The library I'm talking about is OpenDKIM (actually it's kind of a SSF> daemon and a library, but I want to use the library from GPLv2 SSF> code) which uses at the moment a 4-clause-BSD license: SSF> http://www.opendkim.org/license.html " All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by The OpenDKIM Project and its contributors. " SSF> A confirmation if it is really a BSD-with-advertisement license is SSF> very welcomed. That's the advertisement clause, verbatim (excepting the name change, of course). The British spelling of "acknowledgment" is odd but present in the original UCB version. I never noticed that before. Looking at the license at that URL, I see there's also the question of the involvement of the sendmail license which has some rather odd GPL compatibility issues.

On Di, 2010-03-16 at 16:05 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote: > On 03/16/2010 03:40 PM, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote: [...] > > Looking at the license at that URL, I see there's also the question of > > the involvement of the sendmail license which has some rather odd GPL > > compatibility issues. > > Yeah... but since the copyright holder is Sendmail, Inc on those files, > we can assume that the Sendmail License is GPL compatible here (I'm also > going to assume that any changes made by the The OpenDKIM Project to > files originally under the Sendmail License are done under the BSD with > advertising license). That's true. OpenDKIM is a fork of a project called dkim-milter which is orphaned at the moment and was developed by employees of Sendmail Inc. and therefore shouldn't be a license problem. Only the changes made to the forked project are licensed as BSD-with-advertisement. > If I were you, I would ask the OpenDKIM project if they would be willing > to drop the advertising clause. I already sent an email to the project maintainer and hope to hear from him soon.