On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Alessandro Rubini wrote:
The program as a whole must be licensed according to GPL terms, but each part (file or whatever) can still be licensed in a different way as long as it's a gpl-compatible license.
what does "Program as a whole" mean ? (sorry)
does this mean :
- their own package without my library - a big-package : all their code + mine
Thus, your used can't distribute the binary unless on GPL terms, but some parts can be reused according to different terms.
ok
However, please be careful when talking about "BSD" license, as there's not one of such licenses. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html explains why it is unclear to talk about BSD-style licenses.
I'll check again, thanks for the tip.
I'm currently trying to make the other software authors change their license to GPL to comply with my module's license.
It's not needed. But the program _as_a_whole_ must be GPL'd if they include your code.
still not clear for me, see above.
They can close their source, but not link them with your library in that case. So they don't need to change license to use your library in the free release; they just won't be able to use the library in a non-free release.
ok, I understand
1 - give them my software under the BSD license in exchange of money.
Yes. Why still releasing to the public the GPL version. Sure people can distribute the BSD version, but if yours is the "official" one you most likely won't loose control of it. But yes, having to "competitors" in this way might be very bad to handle.
Yes it may be a problem
2 - allow them to give/resell and/or close their sources which include my own BSDized (or other) sources.
You might give them a copy with a different license, still not BSD, that they could use in the non-free version. They should have no problem in linking the GPL library from the free distribution.
ok
3 - don't allow any of their "client" to extract my library's sources from their whole package and redistribute it under the BSD license, since I want to keep my library under the GPL for the rest of the world.
That's whay I say above, but your terms are wrong. IF there's such clause than it's not BSD at all.
ok so I delete 3 and then I must "innovate" to crunch my BSD/proprietary competitors ;-)
Not that bad, after all !
Hope this helps
I've asked to the FSF but I've got no answer yet.
Sorry, we are very backlogged.
No problem.
Thanks to all for the invaluable help !
Jerome Alet - alet@unice.fr - http://cortex.unice.fr/~jerome Fac de Medecine de Nice http://wwwmed.unice.fr Tel: (+33) 4 93 37 76 30 Fax: (+33) 4 93 53 15 15 28 Avenue de Valombrose - 06107 NICE Cedex 2 - FRANCE