Quoting John Cowan (co...@ccil.org): > I know of a program which consists of a fairly large library which does > most of the work, issued under a permissive license, and a small > interactive main program which provides the command line. This main > program is provided in two versions. One works with GNU readline and is > GPLed; the other does not provide line editing and is under the same > permissive license as the library. The author can do this because he is > free to violate his own license to create the readline-free version of the > code, but users would not be.
Will you forgive a quibble, John? I don't mean to distract from your overall point, which is well-taken. The author in your hypothetical is not actually violating his/her own licence, because he/she already had statutory rights to the work's copyright-covered rights, and didn't need a licence to get them. I'm mentioning this because some people seem to think licence conditions flow up the licensor's arm and attach to his/her brain, when in fact they're just a property he/she can attach to a specific codebase instance, which explains how different instances can exist with differing licence regimes. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org https://lists.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss