On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo
Tom Tobin wrote:
I can write the SFLC and pose a hypothetical situation that captures the gist of what we're talking about, and post the response here, if anyone is interested.
I suggest that you put together a question, post it here for comments and when there is some form of concensus pass the question on the the SFLC.
This sounds good to me; I don't think any of us are lawyers, but if we have lawyers available to ask questions for free, let's take advantage of it. I'm thinking something along these lines: Myself and several other members of a mailing list for a particular programming language were recently discussing a situation where a BSD-licensed work required a GPL'd library. The ensuing discussion led to much confusion all around, as we've all read various (different!) things regarding honoring the GPL, and even where we've read the same thing, we took away different conclusions. We came up with a list of questions that would help us understand the matter better, and we were hoping you could help us answer them. The background situation: X is a library distributed under the GPL. Y is another library that uses that library and requires it in order to compile and function. 1) Is there any scenario where Y can be distributed under a non-GPL license (e.g., the BSD)? 2) If so, what would Y's author need to do (or *not* do)? 3) If Y must be released under the GPL under the above scenario, and someone subsequently wrote library Z, an API compatible replacement for X, and released it under the BSD license, would Y's author now be permitted to release Y under the BSD? (Feel free to add more questions, and/or suggest tweaks.)