[Fedora-legal-list] Please define "effective license" (for the love of consistency)

[Julius Davies]

ps.  My email is more of a personal tangential thought I'm having and
not really relevant to Orcan's original questions since it doesn't
have any implications for what to put in the RPM license tag!

Here's my attempt at answering Orcan's question:

1.  If source contains at least one GPL source code file (but let's
ignore header files) and this source code is compiled into a binary
file, then the license of the binary file must be:

a.  If the binary is a single work derived from all the source code
files, then that GPL code will take precendence, and the binary as a
whole becomes GPL.

b.  If the binary is a compilation, then I don't know what happens!

I'm curious if Java jar files are compilations.


2.  As for header files, well they don't really end up in the binary
file, do they?  So does it matter?  And I vaguely recall some notion
that API's are not copyrightable, so couldn't someone always rewrite a
header file to contain the minimum necessary for compilation and then
release that version under any license they like?


yours,

Julius


On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 8:29 PM, Julius Davies <juliusdavies at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Maybe the overall "master" copyright license for the Fedora
> compilation causes every single GPL+ compatible file inside Fedora to
> be licensed as GPL+ ?  So every LGPL, BSD, MIT file which *can* be
> relicensed in this way *is" even if such a relicensing is unnecessary
> for license compliance?  Take a look at this file on your Fedora
> CDROM:
>
> ftp://ftp.nrc.ca/pub/systems/linux/redhat/fedora/linux/releases/12/Everything/i386/os/GPL
> -----------
> *****************************************************************************
> The following copyright applies to the Fedora compilation and any
> portions of Fedora it does not conflict with. Whenever this
> policy does conflict with the copyright of any individual portion of Fedora,
> it does not apply.
>
> *****************************************************************************
>                    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
>                       Version 2, June 1991
>
> [Rest of file is verbatim copy of GPLv2 license.]
> -----------
>
>
> Notice I'm saying GPL+ and not GPLv2+ because of information on the
> "Licensing:FAQ - FedoraProject" wiki page:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/FAQ
>
> -----------
> If neither the source, nor the upstream composed documentation says
> anything about the license version, then it could be under _ANY_
> version of the GPL. The version listed in COPYING is irrelevant from
> this perspective. Technically it could be under any license, but if
> all we have to go by is COPYING, we'll use COPYING to imply that it is
> under the GPL, all versions (GPL+).
> -----------
>
>
>
> yours,
>
> Julius
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Orcan Ogetbil <oget.fedora at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> On 12/12/2009 07:24 AM, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 5:25 AM, Michael Schwendt  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Fedora's Licensing Guidelines don't use the term "effective license"
>>>>> anywhere. Not even in the section on dual licensing, which is the scenario
>>>>> where the packager may choose to pick either license for the whole
>>>>> program.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no such thing as an "effective license" related to the Mixed
>>>>> Source Licensing Scenario [1], because re-licensing a program, such as
>>>>> converting from LGPL to GPL, is not done implicitly or automatically.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks but that doesn't answer my question. Are so many people just
>>>> imagining things? Why does this inconsistency exist? I'd like to have
>>>> this cleared up so we won't have to discuss the same issue over and
>>>> over again.
>>>
>>> People are just confused. The issue has already been clarified. Is there
>>> still some specific confusion?
>>
>> Okay. Whenever someone says "most restrictive license wins" again, I
>> will say "no", and will refer to this thread.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Orcan
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Fedora-legal-list at redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legal-list
>>
>
>
>
> --
> yours,
>
> Julius Davies
> 250-592-2284 (Home)
> 250-893-4579 (Mobile)
> http://juliusdavies.ca/logging.html
>



-- 
yours,

Julius Davies
250-592-2284 (Home)
250-893-4579 (Mobile)
http://juliusdavies.ca/logging.html