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RE: [Nasm-devel] NASM License and GPL compatibility
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From: Nelson R. <che...@at...> - 2000-07-18 19:04:18
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Actually, Julian's license isn't very restrictive at all. All they've really said otherwise is that they want credit and that if you're going to sell their work they want royalties. The Mozilla license isn't even compatible with the GPL is it? To quote the GNU website for compatible licenses: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html "The Mozilla Public License (MPL). This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; unlike the X11 license, it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the MPL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the MPL for this reason." I think RMS would disagree with you in reference to LGPL'ing it. ;-) He explicitly wants that reserved for libraries and used very little if ever. Putting it under the BSD license might be too lenient for Julian's and Simon's tastes. And they definitely don't want their work being incorperated into commercial work without their consent so BSD and LGPL are both out of the question. I agree, they should have dual licensed it. The way id Software dual licenses Quake under the GPL and under a proprietary license. This would not allow them to ask for credit to be given and ask for royalties from commercial entities selling their product. However, I think Copyright law implies that you must give credit to the original author(s) regardless. So I suppose that section in the NASM license is sort of redundant. Yes, you have a point there. Helixcode/Eazel do this exact method of dual licensing and its really nasty. Everyone who contributes signs over their copyright, bad karma. I'm okay with the current license, how is it gnawing you? Maybe we can ask for certain things to be molded to accomodate us if Julian and Simon are willing. -----Original Message----- From: nas...@li... [mailto:nas...@li...]On Behalf Of Kendall Bennett Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2000 2:12 PM To: nas...@li... Cc: Ju...@ac... Subject: Re: [Nasm-devel] NASM License and GPL compatibility "Nelson Rush" <che...@at...> wrote: > After having taken several baths and getting numerous printed > copies of the license wet and unreadable I think I've finally got > it. If you see anything I missed, let me know. Basically the way I see it, the NASM license should be changed to a single license. If Julian Hall and Simon Tatham are not happy with making it pure GPL, then there are two other options that they can exercise: 1. Put it under the LGPL, such that code from it can be linked with other non-GPL code as a 'library'. Ie: a libnasm.a library can be created and used with other applications that want to use stuff from NASM. This is not really all that useful since NASM itself does not lend much of it's internals to a library. 2. Put it under a less restrictive Open Source license. Two potential licenses are a Mozilla Public License derivative (we use this for our SciTech MGL Graphics Library), or the BSD license. The BSD license is very unrestrictive, allowing people to do almost anything with the code (including making commercial derivatives). The MPL is more restrictive in that it allows for commercial use of the code, but modifications to the code itself must always be free and licensed under the MPL. My vote would be for this to be put it under a Mozilla Public License derivative if they want to allow use in other non-GPL projects. Personally I don't like the LGPL, so I would steer clear of it. However I still think the best solution is to simply re-license the 0.98 sources under the full GPL license for this project. Perhaps Julian or Simon can comment on this, and whether they are willing to re-license it under a regular GPL license? > In section IV there are a couple of statements indicating that this > software may be incorperated into proprietary work and that the > authors of NASM may possibly require royalties if so. This is also > allowed under the LGPL, although the whole royalty thing sounds a > bit odd so I'm not sure if that is compatible so I've left it under > !!!s. Basically if the code is dual licensed, it gives proprietry developers an option to license the non-GPL'ed version of the code for commercial purposes. This is exactly what the Cygwin folks have done with their stuff on the Win32 platform. The Cygwin libraries are under a pure GPL licensed (with an exception clause to allowing linking with other Open Source projects that are not GPL). For use in commercial projects, you need to purchase a commercial license from Cygwin. However this type of dual licensing is a major pain when it comes to working with contributions from others, since the contributors have to be clearly aware that their work will be under the dual license if they contribute it back to the project. In fact the only way to legally ensure that this is the case, is to require that contributors assigned their copyright to the original authors so they will own it and hence can dual license it. In the case of Cygwin, if you contribute any code to this project you have to assign all rights to your modifications to Cygnus (aka Red Hat), otherwise the legal issues for them selling commercial licenses of the code is a nightmare! Personally I think this project should steer completely away from these issues and go with a pure GPL license. Regards, +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | SciTech Software - Building Truly Plug'n'Play Software! | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Kendall Bennett | Email: Ken...@sc... | | Director of Engineering | Phone: (530) 894 8400 | | SciTech Software, Inc. | Fax : (530) 894 9069 | | 505 Wall Street | ftp : ftp.scitechsoft.com | | Chico, CA 95928, USA | www : http://www.scitechsoft.com | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ Nasm-devel mailing list Nas...@li... http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/nasm-devel |
