Re: License question

Tom Lane wrote:

>No, that says that you can't remove the copyright notice from files that
>have it. It doesn't say that nearby files have to have the same
>license. (Compare to the GPL, which *does* say that.)
>
>The bottom line here is that you cannot relicense code you didn't write;
>this is generally true no matter what license it is distributed under.
>
>
No it isn't. If I write code under the LGPL, for example, all you have
to do in order to relicense it is make sure you live up to all of my
requirements. In particular, this means that you CAN relicense it as
GPL, without asking for my permission. Distributing it as GPL makes sure
all of my restrictions are met.

If I relicense this code as LGPL, however, I cannot guarentee that all
of my derived work will have the banners (the LGPL does guarentee that
the copyright notice stay). Hence, I read it as "you cannot use this
code in an LGPL project".

>You can take some Postgres pieces and use them in a project with a
>different overall license, but those pieces are still under BSD license.
>
>
But that's not the BSD license.

> regards, tom lane
>
>
But that, in turn, means I cannot put them in an LGPL licensed project
(or in a proprietary one, but that's not my problem). The LGPL requires
that all files under the same project be under the LGPL.

The BSD license, in contrast to PostgreSQL's, does NOT require me to
copy license related texts around, only the copyrights themselves. It
does pose certain restrictions on what I am allowed to do with the
copyrights, but any modern free software license (GPL included) require
that you keep the copyright notices around

Now, I'm not trying to heal the world. It's enough to me that the
current copyright owners give me permissions to use the code under the
LGPL license. I am saying that calling the PostgreSQL license "BSD
license" is misleading.

I'll also mention that I am, very likely, wrong in my interpretation of
the license. The PostgreSQL license is very similar to the X11 license
(http://www.x.org/Downloads_terms.html), which is interpreted by the FSF
to be GPL compatible
(http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License). This means
I'm defnitely missing something here. What, however?

Oh, or is the license in my link the NEW X11 license, known to be
non-GPL compatible?

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/