On Sep 28, 2011, at 8:12 AM, Simon Wise wrote:
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.
Well said. The library in question is pidip, it had an additional
clause about no military or repressive use, which is not GPL
compatible, but is BSD compatible.
.hc
Looking at things from a more basic level, you can come up with a more
direct solution... It may sound small in theory, but it in practice,
it can change entire economies. - Amy Smith