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Re: GPL Liscensing on New Release: What Gives?
> I was really surprised at the announcement that the new
> release of oskit is encumbered by the GPL scheme. What
> is really disturbing is that someone tacked on the cult Iicensing
> even though the project was funded by DARPA. What gives?
I wouldn't agree with calling the GPL a "cult license", but it is a
problematic license and subject to a lot of misunderstandings and
misuse. The oskit would seem to be an example of this.
There are various different licenses under which different parts of
the oskit are provided. The licenses don't combine well because the
GPL requires that it apply to any program that contains GPL'd code as
a whole and that the program not have any further restrictions in
addition to the GPL (see section 6).
While it can be argued that there is a precedent (glibc) for combining
BSD-style licenses with the (L)GPL despite the additional requirements
(even though they are just for acknowledgment, a strict interpretation
of the GPL would make this impossible), anything more restrictive
(such as the MGR license) is certainly not permissible.
I suspect that even the use of BSD code in glibc might only be made
valid by section 7 of the LGPL, which does not apply to anything using
the GPL.
In the case of the oskit itself, you could probably get away with
saying that the various parts of the oskit are separate "programs".
However, you cannot make that claim for programs linked against the
oskit libraries, so there are no valid license terms under which a
binary distribution of any program linking against all of the oskit
libraries can be made. Source distributions should be ok, since they
merely rely on the API of the oskit, which doesn't imply a specific
implementation with specific licensing terms.
But then again, I'm not a lawyer, and I only know what the license
terms say, I don't know how they should be intepreted according to the
laws of any country.
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