Re: Licensing Issues

[Marc Brünink]

On Sunday, February 27, 2005, at 01:28 AM, Frederico Muñoz wrote:

> On 2005-02-26 19:28:29 +0000 Matthew D Swank <akopa@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> (...)
> > This is slightly of topic, but I am writing an original wrapper for 
> > PCRE. I
> > am willing to assign copyright to the FSF, but PCRE itself has a 
> > different
> > license (BSD) would my framework be a candidate for inclusion in 
> > GNUstep?
>
> I'm not an expert, but is that BSD licence is the one without the 
> advertisement clause the it is GPL compatible, and furthermore it can 
> be changed to GPL by anyone, i.e. if you make a slight modification of 
> PCRE you can release the entire code as GPL.

Actually you don't have to modificate BSD licensed code to change the 
license. Everyone  can grab the code, put her own license on top of it 
(in fact its a modification), run away, and make billions of dollars.


>  So you can licence your framework using the GPL and assign the 
> copyright to the FSF at will.
Just a short clarification: You can write your wrapper, license it 
under GPL, assign the copyright to the FSF, even change the license of 
the BSD licensed code, but you cannot change the copyright of the 
original BSD licensed code without permission of the author.

At least thus I understood the BSD license.

Marc