On Monday, December 13, 2010 10:29:00 AM UTC-5, Branko Vukelic wrote: On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Anthony <abas...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hmm, I thought it was just the opposite -- people like MIT/BSD because they > don't place any restrictions on how you license a modified/derived work. So, > you can take an MIT/BSD licensed program, modify/combine it, and then > release the modified/combined version as LGPL, GPL, or even closed source. MIT does not permit that, as far as I can tell. "to deal in the Software without restriction", which invalidates your claim because "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."
I'm not sure you can release a modified MIT program as GPL or closed source, but I believe you can include it in a GPL or closed source program -- this is according to the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License). In any case, this wouldn't apply to BSD, as BSD only requires inclusion of the copyright notice (not the permission notice). Closed-source means restriction, and so does GPL. So MIT is not compatible. Afaik, GPL doesn't consider BSD as GPL-compatible, either. The GNU website disagrees with you -- it lists both the modified BSD and the MIT (Expat) license as GPL-compatible (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html). So do the Wikipedia entries for BSD and MIT. > If this isn't the case, then web2py would already be in violation of various > contrib licenses, no? Yes. Based on the above, it would appear not -- MIT/BSD programs can even be included in closed source/proprietary software. > Yes, I think that's right (if you just "point" to the source rather than > actually include it, you might have to make sure you point to the originally > distributed version, not just the current version at web2py.com). We might > simplify this by (a) including a link to the appropriate source version That won't do. According to GNU, you have to host the sources yourself, and ensure that it is available at least 3 years after you've stopped distributing the binaries. According to GPL, "the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party)". You are obligated to make sure it remains available, so relying on a third party may be risky, but it appears to be allowed. I just don't understand why you insist that closed-source web2py should be allowed. I don't think it should be, and Massimo has also stated to that effect. I don't believe I have insisted nor even suggested that closed-source web2py should be allowed. Massimo already allows it -- that's the commercial exception. It says you can distribute the binary without the source. I don't believe we should allow anyone to modify the web2py framework itself and then make that closed source -- that's an entirely different issue, and I'm not talking about that. Anthony
