Jason vanRijn Kasper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If somebody wiser than I about the black arts of copyright issues > can advise me on whether or not it's possible/legal/beneficial to replace > the GPL-2 "viral" license in bbkeys with something more friendly to the > world, so be it.
"Possible/legal": in an abstract way: yes. In this example, no. As the creator and copyright-holder of bbkeys, you can place it under whatever license you wish, even if you used to distribute it under another license. You can even place it under mutliple licenses at the same time (standard-example here: Trolltechs Qt). Note that this, of course, does not put the already released and distributed software quasi retro-actively under the new license (whichever you may choose). Note, too, that the above statement only holds if all of the parts of bbkeys are original, or you did receive the agreement of the original author to include the code AND place it under the new license. Sooooooo: It just occurs to me that you did mention that bbkeys contains GPL'd code (through bbtools codebase from John Kennis, IIRC). In that case, you have but two options: 1) remove all code that was originally GPL'd and not created by you. If you re-write all code from scratch[1] you can distribute it under whatever license you choose. 2) distribute it under the GPL "Beneficial" is subjective. -Jan [1] this is where things can get complicated: it's theoretically possible to infringe someone else's copyright by not only stealing the code, but writing code (from scratch) that resembles the original code to a certain extent. Were you to re-implement the GPL's code and it was a bit too similar, John Kennis could sue you. Theoretically. If he (and/or you) could afford a lawyer. One who knows stuff about Copyright in general. And GPL in particular. Obviously not me. IANAL. See header.
