On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 03:59:08PM -0500, Daniel Ouellet wrote:
> Richard Stallman wrote:
>> recently we saw theft of BSD to GPL, and a large part of the
>> GPL community thinks there's no problem with that, that the
>> BSD community is being "petty" to make an issue out of it.
>>
>> I don't think it is wrong in general to relicense code from BSD to
>> GPL. However, in some cases I think it is more useful not to do so,
>> in order to contribute changes back to the original BSD-licensed
>> project.
>
> How could you in all conscience come and *talk, arguing, judging and
> pretend to defend and promote freedom* when you are in fact publicly
> promoting license to steel!?
>
> Richard, *the secret software agent 007 with license to kill*?
>
> How dare you to come and talk about freedom and promoting actions like
that!
>
> You *can't relicense* code under your choice without the author consent
> period!
I assumed that the issue was *adding* GPL code to a BSD-licenced project,
not changing the licence on the already-written code. In this case, RMS
is right that there is nothing technically wrong with this, but that
licencing the code under a BSD licence may be more useful.
You are right, of course, that only the licence-holder can change the
licence. I'd prefer to assume, though, that RMS simply misunderstood the
hypothetical situation, rather than intentionally recommending copyright
violation.
Ben
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