is it a GPL violation or not ?

[Joerg Schilling]

>From: list-fsf-eu-discussion at faerber.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Claus_F=E4rber?=)

>Jerome Alet <alet at librelogiciel.com> schrieb/wrote:
>> During my first contact with them, some months ago, I already
>> proposed them :

>>   1 - Put their software under the GNU GPL : probably difficult.
>...
>> It seems there's another possibility :
>>   4 - Put their software under a GPL compatible license : probably
>>       easier.

>GPL-compatible means that the licence is either identical to or laxer  
>than the GPL. If it's possible to put the code under a laxer licence,  
>you can also use the GPL.

>Actually, anyone can take a project with a laxer licence, and put his/ 
>her changes under the GPL.

This is right, but GPL is incompatible with the BSD license.

You are not allowed to remove the BSD license and to replace it with the GPL.

1)	You are not allowed to remove the BSD copyright notice

2)	BSD forces you to tell your users that you did incorporate code
	from a specific Author (the one who wrote the BSD'd code).

3)	I doubt that the original Author would like to see his
	code published under a less free (in this case the GPL) license 
	than he originally used.

However, there is no problem to use *BSD licensed code from a GPLd project.

Jörg

 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de		(uni)  If you don't have iso-8859-1
       schilling at fokus.gmd.de		(work) chars I am J"org Schilling
 URL:  http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling   ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix