> As I'm sure you know, it's perfectly legal to combine GPL and X and BSD > code into the same program.
yes, but one has to change the license of the final work in ways that authors are sometimes unwilling and/or unable (ie the original author does not exist/cannot be found) to do, for one reason or another; this causes some amount of loss of sharing and wasted effort when things clash due to licensing issues that most everyone agrees are pretty stupid. > However, what I believe you're pointing out is that: because the DFSG > doesn't provide exactly the same guidelines as the GPL, it's possible to > have DFSG code which can't be combined in the same program as the GPL. > [Then again, the same goes for other combinations of DFSG licenses.] pretty much, yes. and as i have pointed out i'm picking on one particular combination of licence, because it's <a> the most glaring/popular/etc., and <b> the first one i thought of. > It's probably worth pointing out that DFSG was never intended to make > sure that all debian programs could be combined arbitrarily to create > new programs. Otherwise there are some significant programs we'd have > to kick out of main. > Basically, I think you want to derive something with the transitive > ["viral"] qualities of the GPL which still allows any DFSG code to > be combined with it. But this can never work because, for example, > the DFSG does not prohibit a license from having a clause of the form: > No other licenses may be applied to this program. > > So you'd have to derive a new DFSG as well, to make this work. well, it doesn't have to be perfect; i'd just like one that's a little more tolerant. if there are compatibility issues on the other side i can't really do much about it. to paraphrase a certain document by a recently-discussed author, i don't want to solve all the world's problems, only some of them. ;p --phouchg "Reasoning is partly insane" --Rush, "Anagram (for Mongo)" PGP 5.0 key (0xE024447449) at http://cif.rochester.edu/~phouchg/pgpkey.txt
