On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, J.Brown (Ender/Amigo) wrote:
Permission is hereby granted ... to ... sublicense ...
Actually:
"sublicense: A license giving rights of production or marketing of products or services to a person or company that is not the primary holder of such rights."
That doesn't actually mean, in the context of the BSD license, they could legally change the license from that given by the primary copyright holder. It only means they are given the right to attach a EULA, or suplementary license, to the product.
Thanks for the correction. It is interesting and gave me an idea for modifying the current license. So I'm just throwing it out there for what it's worth:
[...] Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: [...]
Or, in traditional unified diff form :-) :
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the -"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including -without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, +"Software"), to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
Pros: 1. AFAIU, it makes it impossible to change the Wine license to something else (e.g. the AFPL since this is what started it) 2. it should be equivalent to the current license in all other respects: - companies can still make proprietary derivatives to port their applications or differenciate themselves - no 'viral' wording or linking issues that could frighten companies 3. intermediate between the original X11 and the LGPL
Cons: 1. it's a non-standard license. As such it needs to be reviewed in detail and submitted to the OSI to make sure it is 'open-source' compliant. 2. it may be possible to publish the source and still restrict what users can do with it via a EULA. I'm not entirely sure about that so it should be investigated. 3. it makes it hard to change the Wine license (yeah, it's both a pro and a con, see pro 1). 4. it does not prevent the fragmentation of Wine into multiple proprietary variants (yes, this too is both good and bad, see pro 2.1)
-- Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr http://fgouget.free.fr/ La terre est une bêta...