gpgme license

[Janos Farkas]

2002-07-23, 21:29: marius aamodt eriksen szerint:
> right.  and redistribution under the terms of the GPL restricts some
> of the fundemental freedoms of the BSD license.

(Possibly, but discussing this is more of a philosophical question,
rather than technical development or practical licensing matter, IMHO.)

> had i bought a commercial, closed-source library, the conditions would
> (most likely) allow me to keep my current license for *MY* source,

"Forcing" the GPL on an derivative work does not change any of the
components itself.  It simply puts a "protective" GPL veil on it,
analogous to a tab "Free as in GPL, restrict no more!".  If the original
license of a component is BSD, anyone can rip it out, and do what he
wants with it, it's still BSD.  What you can't do is destroy the veil,
and say: "it *is* BSD, so I improved it for myself, and I don't want to
give it away anymore, only the binary if you ask nicely."  (that is, if
you want to use the rest of the GPL'd components too!)

The "Forced" GPL only controls the copying/redistribution as a whole;
individual components may be *more* free, and handled accordingly.  You
can also make this more explicit by expressing this intention in your
redistributed package.  (A sidenote, for GPL's purpose, "new" BSD is
more free, the older, ad-clause BSD was less free, since it imposed a
further restriction not allowed by the GPL.

As rule of thumb, the GPL only affects those who wants to use GPL code;
if your work is more free, it won't be taken away by the GPL army..  (If
it is less free, it's even less probable :) Remember this the next time
you see Microsoft cursing the GPL itself..

I hope I addressed your apparent misunderstanding adequately...

-- 
Janos
romfs is at http://romfs.sourceforge.net/