On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 08:40:22AM -0700, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
so if you want your patches to be included into Pd proper, then they must (legally) be BSD3.
The main restriction here is that you cannot take or revise someone else's code that is licensed under the GPL and decide to _change_ the license to something else. The GPL does not allow that.
Unless you are the copyright holder, you can't *change* the license of BSD3 code, either.
You can bundle BSD licensed code in a collective work which is released under the GPL. However, you cannot remove the license nor the copyright notice from a BSD-licensed file. You don't own the IP, you just have permission to use it under the terms of the BSD license, which includes this provision:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
This makes life challenging in a multi-licensing environment, since code cannot move easily between files under different licenses. Here is how the Apache Software Foundation recommends that its projects handle differently licensed code:
http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#3party
4. Minor modifications/additions to third-party source files should
typically be licensed under the same terms as the rest of the rest of the
third-party source for convenience.
5. Major modifications/additions to third-party should be dealt with on a
case-by-case basis by the PMC.
At the ASF, though, we only deal with modifications to third-party files with permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc). Things get trickier when one of the licenses is the GPL, because the GPL stakes its claim at the boundary of "derivative work", and it takes effort to ensure that BSD code within a project is in no way derived from any of the GPL code in the next directory over.
Marvin Humphrey