On 10/28/10 11:46 PM, Tyson Whitehead wrote:
On October 28, 2010 22:48:56 wren ng thornton wrote:
does not compromise the original requirement to get permission from the University to use their name promotionally. Combining the two as "the copyright holders" or "the University, its contributors, nor Johan Tibell" etc, would have the same effect as the two versions of clause 3 stated separately. If someone wanted to use the University's name (or yours) then they'd have to get their (or your) permission in writing, same as if stated separately.
I would be pretty careful about touching any license wording. It reminds me of a pretty serious spat that went down awhile ago because some BSD wireless code was "re-licensed" under GPL. The individual who did it had thought it was okay as the BSD requirements were a subset of the GPL ones.
Relicensing BSD to GPL is a major change. (Though perfectly legal, in as much as GPL code can always make use of BSD code, and the BSD code still exists separately of the merger (for a while at least).) However, taking BSD3 and merging it with another BSD3 is fairly straightforward. Merging BSD3 with BSD2 is even simpler, though it amounts to the same thing since anyone using the merged package and wanting to promote themselves via Johan's name must still check that the University doesn't care (since implicitly their code is being used in the promotion). This is why I said that under one reading, the merging of the two licenses is exactly the University's license, with Johan counting as yet another contributor. (If Johan's code is lifted to BSD3, then the same would hold the other way around, since anyone wanting to promote themselves via the University would be implicitly making use of his work in their self-promotion.) If you want to be really picky about it then you can take the Apple approach and just put all the licenses in there. Though, over time, that will become meaningless as the two packages begin to melt together and the official history of any particular part becomes unknowable. This is part of the reason why I prefer versions of the BSD3 which refer to "the copyright holders" as opposed to some specific entity.
The issue is that there are three pieces of work. The University's, yours, and the combined work. Touching the license terms makes it unclear what the permissions are with respect to all these parts. Specifically, this would make it not clear that the name Johan Tibell is not sacred to University's code.
But this only holds for so long. Once there's some major refactoring and the parts of network and network-bytestring are mixed beyond recognition, then there is only the combined work. The University's portion cannot be extracted and considered under the University's license. The combined work must have a license of its own, and while this license must respect the licenses of the component works, the particles of the component works have no special status (unless there is some algorithm specifically documented as being the sole product of someone in particular). -- Live well, ~wren