On 28/09/11 19:31, Marvin Humphrey wrote:
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 12:14:00PM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Pd-extended as a whole is under the GPLv3, that's the easiest way to think about it. Some sections of it are under the BSD License, some under the Tcl License (which Pd was originally), some under GPLv2, etc.
My personal thoughts on the license of what is in pd-extended.git are more vague. Yes, the intention is for much/most of that code to contributed back to Pd, but my only distribution of the whole thing is part of the Pd-extended package, which is GPLv3. So if you want to be sure, consider it GPLv3.
OK, then:
Since "Pd-extended as a whole is under the GPLv3", if I ever supply a patch against Pd-extended.git, I must assume that the GPLv3 applies to it if I "want to be sure".
... unless it is to one of the many files that are licensed with the BSD style pd-vanilla license, or unless you are adding new files - where you could of course license then as you please, as long as that license allows it to be distributed along with the other stuff in the usual pd extended manner. As matju noted there are lots of suitable areas to contribute to if you wish to avoid the GPL, including most of the parts which are extensions of the vanilla codebase.
It sounds as though if I want to avoid producing GPLv3 code, I need to steer a wide berth around Pd-extended.
or rather if you wish to avoid GPL you should avoid the libraries and other stuff licensed with GPL, and you can't be sure they are not GPL without looking at the license notices on the files yourself.
Also, it sounds as though "if you want to be sure", no code which was ever derived from Pd-extended can ever be merged upstream into Vanilla without violating the GPL.
... only code from those parts that are GPL licensed, and this is presumably the desire of the authors of those parts ... though of course anything written by a single person, or a small group, could of course be offered (by the authors only) as a patch under the usual vanilla license if they wished. I think this has happened from time to time, nothing stops an author distributing their own work under several different licenses, depending on the context.
If I can't "be sure" that other Pd contributors won't claim that the GPL applies to contributions I'm making that are intended for the Vanilla's BSD core, that makes it a lot less attractive to contribute to this project.
By "if you want to be sure" I read ... the contents of pd-extended is believed by those distributing it to be compatible with GPL3, so they say you can use it in any context that GPL3 is usable, provided you comply with the conditions of the license - including of course all the attribution requirements.
Many parts are more widely usable than the GPL allows, but you would need to check the license for that part before doing so ... the only thing that the distribution claims is that its contents are all compatible with GPL3.
I think a library was dropped recently because the license was too restrictive for GPL3.
Simon