Feedback on free software licence requested

Tristan Miller psychonaut at nothingisreal.com
Tue Jan 25 14:27:36 UTC 2005


Greetings.

I have a colleague who wishes to release a program under a free software 
licence. However, he and/or our company wishes to reserve the right to use 
and relicense any third-party contributions under another (possibly 
non-free) licence. I therefore suggested using the following licence:

Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the 
additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you 
publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide, 
royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display, 
perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions 
thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as 
source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.

However, I believe that such a licence would break compatibility with the 
GPL (and probably most other free software licences). Am I correct? If so, 
I suppose this might discourage people from contributing to the project, 
and would also preclude the inclusion of or linking to GPL-covered 
third-party code.

If anyone has comments on this licence or ideas for modifications or for 
some alternative licence which could be used, please let me know and I'll 
pass them along to my colleague.

Regards,
Tristan

-- 
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(7_\\    http://www.nothingisreal.com/   ><  To finish what you
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